Lucia Simon Marcos - What a Year It Has Been

 It's the end of the year for the Youth Exchange Program and even now our YEP student, Lucia Simon Marcos, from Madrid, Spain, is traveling across the United States on a bus with YEP students from around the region. Only four of the nine D7470 YEP students went on the trip. Unfortunately Lucia lost her phone on her first night of the trip - in Washington, DC - so we have no reports on her visit - but we are hoping to get a full report before she returns home.

After a year of rigorous academics, studying for the college exams, and learning how to speak a language that was almost totally foreign to her when she arrived last August, Lucia, now 18 has grown up. This photo of Lucia and YEP student Sebastian (Mexico) portrays a much more grown up Lucia than when she first arrived last August. During the year her English improved dramatically, she experienced a night at Yankee Stadium, the King Tut exhibit. sleep-over parties, her first experience in the cold of the Poconos (which she described as Siberia), playing in the snow with other YEP students in Mount Olive, watching the cadets at Annapolis, visiting a college campus with her first host sister Lindsey Carter, and the hospitality of numerous people who offered Lucia a taste of New Jersey hospitality.