By Sally Portman ’13, Contributor

This year Martha Lamotte ’13, Julien Courriol ’14, and Jiayi Wu ’15, have jumped “across the pond” to discover what life in America is truly like, and so far they are enjoying their experience, discovering major differences from their schools back home.

Lamotte, from Bremen, Germany, is staying with the Pease family. Martha explained that her family has been “friends with them since [she] was really young,” so her choice to come to Cincinnati for the year was easy. She has Henry Pease ’12, showing her the ropes around CCDS. Lamotte wants “to learn better English, and to live in [yet] another country for a year before I graduate.” She arrived in time for soccer pre-season, so “I got to know the people better, and the daily routine is more familiar,” Lamotte said.

Julien Courriol is joining us from Issoire, France. He decided to spend a year abroad because he “wanted to be bilingual and I wanted to see how [Americans] live every day in the USA.” He applied through AFS to go somewhere in the United States and was placed with Hannah Stewart ’12. He arrived a few weeks ago and so far Courriol is very happy with his decision to come.

Jiayi Wu, a new freshman from China, came to CCDS because her “mother wanted to let [her] start a life in America.” Wu settled on Cincinnati due to family connections, but she is staying with a host family for the year. Her initial experiences in the US have satisfied Wu’s expectations and validated her decision to leave home for a year and travel overseas.

“Here it is very different, teachers, food, classrooms, sports and classes,” said Wu. Both Martha and Julien also noticed a different environment at Cincinnati Country Day compared to their schools back home. “In Germany, we don’t have the close friendship between students and teachers, but teachers have more distance to us, just teaching, nothing more,” said Lamotte. “I like this way much better.” Julien agreed that his school in France is quite different in every respect. “Classes, sports, teacher-student relations, and in France, class ended at 5!”

While all three are focused on improving their English over the course of the year, they take the same classes they would in their native countries and are expected to understand and succeed in them, but they’ve found that learning in other languages can be difficult. Lamotte feels that taking classes in an English-speaking environment is alright, but French is the hardest of all her classes—having to keep 3 languages

straight gets a little tricky. In “History and English it is difficult for me,” stated Courriol, “but in Algebra and Spanish it is easier.” Wu laughed that classes at Country Day are “harder, so hard!” but she is still managing fine.

Though coming to a new place with new people and a new language is a challenge, Lamotte, Courriol and Wu have all been diving into the unfamiliar culture and engaging in the school community, enjoying the fun of the adventurous experience.