Those funky, pointy little tents are the entryways for ticketholders.

Scenes from the opening ceremony.

The ceremony was pretty funky. All of these things had some kind of symbolic meaning, too, but I was more interested in the pretty colors.

Fireworks. (In case you're wondering why the sky looks so red...)

Ooh. Pretty colors.

Notice the empty seats - the grey parts in the stands. There was a ticket-selling scandal involving FIFA (the international governing body of soccer) and a British company they'd farmed ticket sales out to. It wasn't that people didn't want the seats - there were folks outside the stadium desperate for tickets, in fact. It's just that they weren't being sold. By the next game we saw, the Korean soccer organization had decided to print its own tickets, and pretty much filled the stadium...

A French-Korean flag.

Oh right - there was soccer involved in here somewhere too, right?

Yours truly at the game.