GIG has recently got much worse for two reasons:

1) – Customs has acquired an X-ray machine and they now insist on putting every single piece of baggage through it. That in itself takes a long time, and they now manually inspect many more bags because of suspicious looking items they see in their x-rays. For example, I had some old plates my family gave me and customs thought I must have been smuggling in valuable porcelain antiques.

2) – There is a chief customs inspector who insists upon personally inspecting each traveler’s passport. He looks through at all the stamps and tries to read each one. Naturally this takes a large amount of time and causes enormous lines. When the chief is off duty, things go much quicker.

The old press the button system is gone! I haven’t been through GRU lately, but GIG is hell. For all that trouble, I’ve never seen them actually find anything.