Fika! Have a break!

Fika may sound like some odd sexual endeavour or a swear word of sorts but in actual fact it is a coffee break. I cannot believe that I have dedicated an entry to this before. Oh the horror! How could I leave telling you about such a quintessential part of Swedish life till so late in the game.

There is more to a Fika than just a coffee break. Or is there? (Dom dom dom). Fika, as far as my understanding of it goes, is when you take a break from whatever it is your are doing and top up your caffeine tank and have a little something to satisfy your sweet tooth.

Believe it or not I didn't drink coffee before I came to Sweden. Well, not good coffee anyway. I used to think that instant coffee with milk and sugar was the way it was done and found that filter coffee made me feel ill. However, after only a few weeks in Sweden I was a convert in every sense of the word. I now drink coffee black and strong!

Anyway - enough about me and back to Fika!



Ok, so I have now established that Fika is a word used when you want to have a coffee break but in the work place this is also attached to two specific times of the day: 10am and 3pm. When I was doing my internship it would always amaze me how most people would down tools at these times and like a flock of migratory birds steer their way to the coffee machine. Sometimes sitting in silence and other times chatting about mundane tidbits Fika was just a part of the way it was done. A socially accepted break! A recharge! A necessity!

I quite like the idea but must admit to skipping a few of these social occasions (where I heard a lot of Swedish which was great) due to wanting to get on with my work. Working in SA I remember eating lunches in front of my PC and the idea of stepping away for a coffee break twice a day on top of lunch would have just seemed ludicrous!

So the next time your boss or supervisor or whatever gives you the stink eye while you indulge in a sip of coffee at 10am while staring at the sky, flipping through a magazine, or chatting with friend. Smile and tell them that its the backbone of one of the most progressive societies in the world and who knows they might just grin and join you :)

Here are some other fun facts about Fika the action and Fika the word:

• The word Fika is both a noun and a verb
• To "Ta en fika" (Have a coffee) is an informal break so if you invite someone to join you its rarely misconstrued as having dating or flirtatious incentives. 
• The most traditional sweet cake to have with coffee, in Sweden, is a cinnamon roll (Kanelbulle)
• The word "Doppa" is used to dscribe baked good that accompany Fika and which are dunked into the coffee
• "The word fika is an example of the back slang used in the 19th century, in which syllables of a word were reversed, deriving fika from kaffi, an earlier variant of the Swedish word kaffe ("coffee").[5] From fika also comes the word fik (a colloquial term for "café") through a process of back-formation" (Taken from Wikipedia)
• "The city of Kalmar was the first to set a Swedish fika record: On 6 June 2007, 2,620 people sat down together for a fika. During May–June 2009, the Swedish coffee company Gevalia organized a fika tour in ten different cities to break the record: Kalmar's record was broken four times during Gevalia's fika tour, and Östersund was crowned as the new Swedish fika champions, for having 3,563 people at fika on 30 May 2009." (Taken from Wikipedia)
• Fika is also the name of a town in Nigeria (I don't think there is any relation to the Swedish Fika)