Nept's Journal: morning commute

Just crossed the border at LoWu today. It's the busiest border crossing on earth with 90 million people crossing every year, most of them this morning. I left the Marriott in Hong Kong at 7:30 and arrived at work 9:30, 2 Cabs, 3 trains later. Total cost was about 90HK and 70Y, about 22US$. The actual crossing is in a large building about 100 meters long jammed full of people. Absolutely crammed. There are no empty spots and the "line" bottlenecks at the end of the building into a narrow lane about five people wide. The surge forward is pretty intense. It's like a stack of dominoes that fall over, except everyone falls forward onto the next person and onto the next person, and no one hits the floor, but everyone is pushed forward on a steep angle. I'm 220 lbs and little higher than your average Chin, so on one surge I was about to fall on an old lady about half my size and I just straightened up and put my back against the crowd and shoved backward. The building has several hallways from other MTR light rail that empty into it, if you get caught in the cross surge it can be pretty bad. About a half hour tightly packed into the hall, hot with only a couple dinky fans at the front circulating air, I made it to the visitors line. It was a lot less crowded and much calmer, like Disneyland at Christmas, than the HK residents race. Once they reach the bottleneck, only a trickle are let through customs (it's a quicker, non-passport cusoms for residents) about 3 or 4 thousand at a time. The first sprint is about 60 meters followed by a flight of stairs, and then they move out of sight. If they don't run, they get trampled.
Once I was in line, some officicious looking bloke said something to me I couldn't understand but it seemed to be some sort of survey. He asked my persmission and without waiting for it slapped a yellow sticker onto my coat. When he was gone, I took it off and stuck it on the person ahead of me in line. I'm not sure what it was for.