My boyfriend must be jealous. Because I have fallen in love.
With Paris, that is.
I recently got back from a trip to Paris, the most beautiful city I have ever seen.
Its streets are adorned with delicate buildings that make you feel like you are walking through a labyrinth of wedding cakes.
Its shops overflow with fresh fruits, vegetables, meats, cheeses, tarts, macaroons, chocolates, crepes and other treats that outshine anything the U.S. has to offer.
Its air is suffused with the essence of Paris’ rich history and its mellifluous language.
And its homes are populated with polite, warm people who somehow have earned the unjust reputation for being rude.
But still, although Paris is more than 5,000 miles away from Orange County and was built hundreds of years before OC was a gleam in James Irvine’s eye, our little county has made its mark on the City of Light.
As I boarded my flight to Paris, a French boy wore DC shoes from Huntington Beach-based Quiksilver Inc.
Quiksilver and its brand Roxy also have a spot among the luxury shops on the Champs Élysées; they’re near a store filled with goods from Paris-based PSA Peugeot Citroën SA, Europe’s second largest automaker.
In fact, as I made my way through Paris, its status as a city at the center of a global economy became more and more clear.
When I visited the gift shop of Sainte-Chapelle—a gothic cathedral built in the 13th century by King Louis IX—I found notebooks sold by Canada’s Hartley & Marks Publishers Inc.
My sister, who is a buyer for gift shops, museums and aquariums around the U.S., stocks her stores with the very same wares.
I also spent more time shopping for clothes in Zara, owned by Spain’s Industria de Diseño Textil SA, than I did at any of Paris’ local clothing shops.
Like everyone else, Paris and France have been hit by the global economic crisis.
Its economy shrank 2.25% in 2009.
But compared to other members of the European Union, it has weathered the global economic crisis relatively well.
Last week, France said it expects its gross domestic product to grow by 1.4% this year, up from its previous forecast of 0.75%.
The better forecast is due to an “improved international environment and demand for French products,” Christine Lagarde, economy minister for France, told Reuters.
Some of these French products come from the 27 companies that Paris has on the Fortune 500 list, behind only Tokyo at 51 and well ahead of New York at 18.
Paris also boasts the sixth-largest company in the world. Total SA, an oil company, is based in its outskirts, according to the list.
If you look around, you can see that these French companies and France’s economy influence OC every day.
Paris-based Zodiac is the sixth-largest foreign-owned company with operations in OC, employing 1250 people here, according to Business Journal estimates from this week’s foreign-owned list.
And the county’s biggest software maker—Blizzard Entertainment Inc.—is part of Paris-based Vivendi SA.
In fact, Paris-based companies account for 13% of the employees on this week’s list.
But then again, there are aspects of Paris that just can’t be exported to OC.
Where else can you climb to the top of a city butte and be greeted by painters who are working in the very same spot—Montmartre—that Salvador Dalí, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh and others worked?
Where else can you buy a painting from an artist who was born in Kurdistan and who speaks perfect English and French—a painting that will carry a story with it for as long as you keep it?
Despite all of the wonderful things that OC has to offer—beaches, Disneyland, weather, magnificent shopping—no amount of master planning will produce Paris’ richness and culture.
I suppose that’s why Ernest Hemingway once said, “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a movable feast.”
—Courtney Baird
