My friend and personable coffee shop owner Chris Francis sent me a link to this compelling little video series about fika produced by Sweden.

I’ve spent a lot of time in Sweden over the last decade, and much of that time has been spent doing the activities described as fika in the videos, but nobody has ever referred to these activities as fika to me.

I suspect that the reason for this is that all of my Swedish friends are enormously accommodating to my unilingual Englishness.

And so whereas they may, within the inner sanctum of their Swedishness, be saying something like “Låt oss hoppa över arbetet i eftermiddag och gå ut för några avkopplande fika tid,” to me they will simply say “coffee?”

Such is both the promise and the curse of existing in the warm cocoon of a flexible lot of polylinguals.

Regardless, called fika or not, I can attest that this action–or rather inaction?–is much alive and as described.

The fika and the lifestyle that supports it are, indeed, the cat’s pajamas.