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What’s Your Favorite Place To Fika?

Let’s face it, time is precious, especially when you’re visiting a destination for the first time. You want to extract as much as you can from the place in the time you have available.

That’s the goal with Two Perfect Days Stockholm. Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll develop the ideal itinerary for visitors to Stockholm, and we need your help to do so.

If you live in Stockholm or if you are intimately familiar with the city, please join the conversation.

If you’re planning to visit Stockholm and you’ve landed on this site to research your trip, please tell us what you want to know.

We’re going to make suggestions on how cruise ship passengers can spend two perfect days in Stockholm before or after their cruises, but first we need to lay the groundwork to help you better understand Sweden and its capital city.

Dear Cruise Ship Passenger: Welcome To The Capital Of The World’s Coziest Nation.

In a tiny cafe at one end of Gamla Stan’s Stortorget square, a frothy cappuccino serves as the centerpiece for a scene that represents the quintessence of Stockholm.

In the center of the oversized cup, coffee has been deliberately dripped onto the foamy realms to form a heart, an unintended icon that takes the same shape as Stockholm’s Old Town when seen from the lofty heights of City Hall Tower.

The Old Town, or Gamla Stan as it is known, has been a meeting place since 1252. Today, more than 800 years later, it continues to pulsate as the heart of Stockholm.

As on most days here at the uber-cozy, candlelit and tiny Chokladkoppen, espresso machines hiss as patrons poke their heads through the front door in hopes of finding a vacant table. Those sitting at the tables and those wanting to occupy them are all drawn here by the same primordial urge: the need to fika.

What’s fika? It’s where catching up with friends meets coffee and cakes. But Fika is about much more than caffeine and carbohydrates. It’s a Swedish social institution, where friends sit down and chat about life and current events over snacks like kanelbolle, the Swedish version of a cinnamon bun, and a cappuccino.

At Chokladkoppen, there are no available tables, but here, as in most of Europe, it’s socially permissible to ask if you can share a table using the unoccupied chairs. Doing just that, one couple joins another with polite acknowledgment. The space comes without obligation for small talk.

Conversation is seldom initiated in Sweden anyway as the Swedes are characteristically shy with strangers. And while some visitors mistake the shyness for coldness, the Swedes are anything but cold. In fact, it is warmth that they seek in this nation of prolonged winter darkness (Swedes are rewarded, however, with glorious summers.)

Along with the pleasant mid-afternoon chatter in Chokladkoppen, candles flicker on tabletops. The Swedes cherish light and warmth, and a visitor doesn’t have to be in Sweden long before hearing the Swedes talking about a “cozy” this or that. The word in Swedish is “mysig,” defining the Swede’s seemingly genetic predisposition to seek out or create coziness.

Stockholmers, do you have a favorite place to fika?