Kungfu Major at Tianjin University of Sports

Today we visited the Tianjin Sports University. University of Minnesota actually just put in an office at this school which was very cool to see. Daniel Konold the Program Coordinator took us all around the school and showed us a variety of sports. We saw dragon boat racing, traditional dancing, modern dancing, kungfu and badminton. Everyone is very talented at this school. Daniel told us that a lot of the students that go here are there because the other academic university didn't work out for them. There are some sports universities that really good athletes go because they know they will become pro after college, Daniel told us that this sports university was not like that. Everyone was really talented at their specific major. Each of the sports we saw today are also majors. I thought this was very interesting because we don't have this in the states. In the United States you usually can't major in a sport or go to strictly a sports university. If you're an excellent athlete you can be recruited by the coach of a team and play on the team but you typically have a major and just do sports as an extracurricular activity. In the states we have very famous art colleges like Juilliard which is a school just for the arts like dancing, singing, drama or playing an instrument. When I saw the dancers this reminded me of what an art school would look like but in the states we don't have schools just for sports. The most interesting major I saw today was Kungfu. I had seen kungfu on the television but never in-person before. I was so amazed at how quickly and precise their bodies moved. I thought that this really brought out their culture because in the kungfu show the first thing we saw were two dragons being controlled by two people for each dragon. They were both so on key with each other I thought this was very talented. The dragon means a lot to the chinese culture and I thought it was interesting to see this in one of their sports. I also think that almost everything in the chinese culture has some sort of meaning to it. Today we listened to a story about the dragon boats and how the chinese thought that the dragons lived in the water so they would throw food in the water to keep the dragon from going hungry. They would also bang on a drum to scare away any dragons. I love that everything means something in China I think it says something about their culture.