Teen-Agers See U.S. Up Close and Personal : Education: Youths tour the country by bus to get a new perspective on the nation--and on their lives.

Soo Kim, 15, said her knowledge of Texas had consisted of abstract images created by television and boring history books.

But seeing the real Texas made its heritage and natural wonders come alive, said the Palos Verdes High School student who recently returned from a cross-country trip sponsored by a Los Angeles travel agency and the Urban League.

“There was an eagle perched on the sign that said ‘Welcome to Texas.’ I said, ‘Whoa!’ I’d never seen an eagle before, except at the zoo,” said Kim, one of 70 teen-agers from the Los Angeles and Oakland areas on the two-week bus trip.

Standing at the spot in the Dallas building where Lee Harvey Oswald fired the shots that killed President John F. Kennedy, she said, made the tragedy more real for her.

“All I knew was that he was a President who got shot. I didn’t know how it happened, and how he fell into his wife’s lap and that he was a family guy. I learned he was a good man,” Kim said.

Kim’s broadened awareness is precisely what the trip’s organizers had in mind when they arranged the journey.

After last year’s riots, Noel Irwin-Hentschel, president of AmericanTours International, a Los Angeles travel agency, toured city neighborhoods with Los Angeles Urban League President John Mack. They found a lot of young people who don’t believe they will live to age 18 and who have rarely left the Los Angeles area.

Traveling as a youth, Irwin-Hentschel said, opened her life to new possibilities. So she enlisted the help of the Korean Youth and Community Center and the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay Area Urban League chapters to organize a cross-country tour.

The group, a blend of 25 Latinos, 11 Asian Americans, 25 African Americans, six whites and three Native Americans, was drawn from the Korean center and two Urban Leagues by the tour organizers. Students from diverse economic and academic backgrounds were sought.

“We wanted them to have an experience they will always remember,” Irwin-Hentschel said.

Her agency picked up $100,000 in travel expenses, she said, and Holiday Inn donated the hotel rooms at each of the 14 stops. The itinerary included visits to a slew of national parks (mostly in the Southwest and South), stops at the birthplaces of President Clinton in Arkansas and Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta, and tours of the Empire State Building and the White House.

For most of the students, the idea of taking a trip to New York and Washington, D.C.--all expenses paid--seemed as probable as flying to the moon.

Now, after seeing how other people live, reliving American history and spending time with youths from diverse ethnic groups, their view of the world has changed, they said.

“I thought all people lived the way I imagined, and I found out it wasn’t that way at all,” said Jessica Tarnay, 15, from Westchester.

Tarnay had never been to Las Vegas, and was awed by the cityscape glittering at night.

While on the bus, she said, the students did homework, participated in impromptu geography and history quizzes with chaperons and kept a journal of their experiences.

The Grand Canyon, Tarnay said, was “beautiful, like a matte painting used in the movies where the couple walks off into the sunset.”

The trees were changing colors when the group arrived on the East Coast. “There were shades of red and yellow and purple on the trees I have never seen,” she said.

In New York, the group visited the theater where the “Late Show with David Letterman” is taped, and heard a choir made up of singers from a Harlem drug rehabilitation program.

Tarnay also got a troubling glimpse of New York’s homeless.

“Seeing all the homeless people was so sad. They were sleeping in cardboard boxes, and it was freezing. It made me feel bad,” she said.

Dorsey High School student Ramon Bailey, 15, said visiting restored slave quarters at Williamsburg, Va., gave him a taste of their strength under a harsh life.

“They used to eat raw clams, and since their quarters were near the water they used to throw the shells outside to keep the ground from being so muddy,” he said. The houses were small, “and there were cracks in the walls. You could see right through them.”

Bailey said things he routinely takes for granted, like getting an education and being warm at night, would have been luxuries for the slaves. “We’re spoiled rotten compared to them. They always had to worry about being whipped, or catching pneumonia, or being sold if the overseer thought you weren’t working hard enough,” he said.

Spending time with the diverse group of students was also an education, said Trudette Haymon, 16, a Crenshaw High School student.

“At first, we thought each race would stick with their own. But everybody intermingled. That’s what made the trip so great. Never did I think that a black girl and a Korean boy could get together and talk. But I did it on this trip,” said Haymon, an African American.

The trip, she said, changed her life. “I saw there are other cities, other ways of life. I learned that the United States is not just a map separated by boundaries,” she said.

“In this environment, you soak up all the negative things,” said Haymon, who plans to attend an out-of-state college. “The shootings and carjackings make you get fed up. Sometimes you want to go somewhere where you don’t hear the helicopters at night, where you don’t have drive-by shootings.”

Kim said she was a little disappointed at the end of the trip. “I wasn’t glad to get back home, because I met a lot of nice people. And the trip was so much fun because I was learning so much.

“It was like a history book. But when you see it for yourself, you see how much the history books leave out.”