Mr. Thumb's up and his "gil"

I went to Starbucks with woman from Sweden yesterday. I wore a t-shirt with the Facebook thumbs up button, and the Japanese text that goes with it (いいね). The guy we ordered our matcha lattes from thought the t-shirt was very funny and complimented me on my choice of clothes today.

When we got our matcha cups, mine had a thumbs up drawing and いいね written in katakana (イイネ). This was pretty easy to figure out, but the other cup said "GIL". My guess is that it means "girl", which I guess is an accurate description of who it was for. Though not that discriminative, there were many other girls in the same Starbucks.

There is a Starbucks in Stockholm

I have a Japanese friend who loves Starbucks and who has lived in Sweden. We actually met when she was studying Swedish in Stockholm and I was in Stockholm to graduate and tried not to forget the little Japanese I had learned during my first six months in Japan.

My friend always complains that there are no Starbucks in Sweden. The Swedish image of American coffee is that it is very bad. I don't drink coffee and I have only spent three days in the U.S. so I don't know much myself, but the coffee drinking Swedes I know call American coffee "dirty water". But they do say that if you have to drink coffee in America, Starbucks is one of the better choices among the dirty waters available.

Anyway, I found a Starbucks inside the Stockholm central train station.