Introduction
Hejsan hej is my welcome phrase. It is Swedish and translates to hello, hi. I am PixelPia and I am a Swede living in the US. I moved here in 2003. The reason for this podcast is that I want to share with the world a little bit about Sweden and Swedes. Some things that might seem strange, funny, peculiar, and just weird about us Swedes, our traditions, and things we do.
So let’s talk about what fika really is
As I said, I have been living here now for 18 years and that has made me think about us Swedes in quite a different way than I did back in Sweden. I am a teacher and I am a YouTube creator. And now I added podcasts to my repertoire. So what is a Swedish fika? Well, besides the name of my podcast fika is if we translate the word means coffee, but it is so much more than just drinking coffee to fika, it is to have a coffee with something sweet like a cinnamon bun and relax. It’s a way of recharging your batteries to relax for a short little while, and to collect yourself to go on with your day. You can fika at work with friends and you can fika by yourself and just enjoy your coffee, your cinnamon bun, and your environment, but most often you have your fika with some company.
Where do you fika? Example from a Swedish school
So where do we Swedes fika? Well, you can fika everywhere. You can have a fika at home with some friends. You can go out to a cafe and it’s very common to have a fika break at work. Let me give you an example. As I said, I’m a teacher and at almost every school in Sweden, around 10 o’clock in the morning, you have a fika break. All the students go outside to have their break. And a couple of the teachers have outside-duty, so we take turns the rest of the teachers go to the fika room, and not just only the teachers, all the staff from principals to custodians, to the school nurse and everybody else that works in the school get together in the fika room. Usually, you have a schedule where you take turns preparing the coffee, the tea, or whatever else drinks you, serve, because it’s not only fika, coffee that you have to drink. At many schools, you also have a schedule of who is responsible for bringing in the sweets. That is the sweets you have with your fika. That can be homemade, baked at home, or store-bought. And when it comes to me, I usually bought mine when it was my turn. During this little 20-minute break, a lot of things happen.
You get to know your colleagues on a different level. You talk about TV shows, movies, or books. You talk about your hobbies and you really connect on a more personal level, but it is also in the fika room that most of my best ideas for teaching have been initiated. For example, we had a custodian at one school I worked at that I found has the hobby of beekeeping and he was willing to come into the classroom and talk to the students about it.
I have also found a lot of great courses and lectures from other teachers during my fika break. But fika break is not only for schools. Most workplaces today have this informal break in the morning and in the afternoon where the staff get together, have a cup of fika, and something sweet. Most companies today realize the value of these informal fika breaks and usually, it is not even deducted from their work time. There is a great value in these informal breaks where the staff really get together.
Do you Fika only at work?
But as I said fika is just not something you only do at work, you can fika with your friends. It’s very common that you come over to someone’s house for a fika. You can fika with people that you just have met, say, for example, you attend a course and you meet someone that you really think you want to know better. It’s always okay to suggest that you go out for a fika afterward. It’s a social gathering where you really connect with people.
You can go to coffee shops for fika, and one of my favorite coffee shops was back in Stockholm. It was a small coffee shop and it didn’t look like anything else. All the furniture was mismatched. It had bookshelves with books, some magazines on it, and there were board games that you could play if you were out with a group of friends, And the best part about this little fika-shop was that everything was for sale. Let’s say that you found a book that you really, really wanted. You can always ask and negotiate a price. You could even negotiate the price for an armchair if you found one that really would fit in your home.
History of fika in Sweden
As I have said many times I am a teacher. So there won’t be an episode of a Swedish fika without some learning. So now I want to share with you some fun facts about coffee and Swedes. The Swedes drinks on average 18 pounds of coffee per person per year. The same number in the US is half of that. Nine pounds. We Swedes have been drinking coffee for a very long time.
Coffee was introduced to Sweden by our king, Charles 12th after he had found Turkish coffee on one of his raids down to Turkey. And that was in 1685. And the coffee was originally just for the aristocrats, but eventually, it spread the habit of having coffee or fika to all Swedes.
The first coffee shop, or coffee house, opened in 1710 in Stockholm, Sweden in the 18-hundreds, there were some political movements to try and decrease the Swedish imports and increase the Swedish export. As a result of that movement, Sweden had its first coffee ban in 1756. That band lasted for 10 years. And it was the very first of five bans of coffee. Not all of our Kings like coffee, king, Gustav the third despised coffee. And he saw it as a risk for the people’s health so he, in his attempt to prove how dangerous coffee was, started a very strange experiment. He found a couple of identical twins that were criminals and had been condemned to death, and he promised them to commute their sentence to life in prison if they took part in this experiment. In the experiment, they had to drink three pots of coffee per day, that was one of the twins. The other twin had to drink three pots of tea instead. The king had two doctors to oversee the experiment and as I said, he hoped to prove how dangerous coffee was for human health. We never saw a result of this experiment since both the doctors, and the king himself died before the twins, and the irony of this story is that the twin that drank three pots of tea per day was the one who died first. I don’t know how much later the other twin died, but I’m sure the king would not have been pleased with that result today.
How often do you fika?
Almost all Swedes have two fika breaks per day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon around three o’clock and that is at work. Then we also get together with friends and people we want to get to know a little bit better in the late afternoon after work at night fika Is something that’s very important for us Swedes.
It is a way to relax, to get together, and to recharge. If I could bring only one tradition from Sweden over to the US it would most definitely be the tradition of fika.
So what is next?
Well, it has been time for me to take my fika break. I hope you have enjoyed this episode. And if you want to support me in any way, you can buy me a coffee buymeacoffee.com/aswedishfika You can also find me on my website, aswedishfika.com, and on all social media as A Swedish Fika. I will continue to publish one episode per week and if you want to know more about what’s coming up, you can subscribe to my newsletter on aswedishfika.com. There you can also leave suggestions of topics you would like me to cover in the future. In my next episode, I will talk about how many Americans can’t distinguish between Sweden and Switzerland. If you like this, I wish you would leave a review on this podcast, and the comment. Until next time, as we say in Sweden, Hej då.
