Drink a lot: Drop Coffee, Stockholm

My recent visit to Stockholm coincided with a (very tardy, I'll admit) obsession with Lisbeth Salander, the unlovely yet loveable heroine out of Stieg Larsson's Millenium trilogy. Needless to say, there was only one place for me to go. Ignored were Gamla Stan with its palace and government buildings, the Vasa museum and the boat rides along the islands. Ignored was even the massive summer sale advertised in every shop window. (I did make up for that later.) I arrived, I got off the train and marched linea recta towards Södermalm, home of my heroine.

Once there, I was at a loss. I didn't have a guide book and besides, this wasn't really tourist territory. So I wandered. And found myself ready for a fika. Thanks to Stieg, I'd already learned that the Swedes do nothing before switching on a coffee machine, regardless of the time of day. It turns out it's not just his characters (who admittedly need the caffeine, what with the number of action scenes they need to keep up with) - drinking coffee is a proper Swedish pastime. Fika means as much as 'to go out for a cup of coffee and meet your mates' and is an important part of culture. I could be Swedish.

This being a national sport of sorts, a fab fika place appeared before my eyes as soon as I thought up the word 'coffee'. Drop Coffee, located at Tjärhovsgatan 5, looked stylish, smelt great and sounded, well, quiet. This is not to say there was no one there. On the contrary, the place, kitted out with white floor-to-ceiling tiles and black leather furniture, was fairly packed. Clearly, the Swedes don't feel the need to make a racket when fikaing away. How refreshing.

At Drop Coffee, they take their product seriously. A lovely girl took her time in preparing our caffe latte's. Meanwhile, I sank gratefully in to a battered leather sofa and observed the trendy youngsters who were chatting, working or just staring into space. Funky Drop Coffee calls itself a Coffice (coffee + office, see what they did there?), a place to work and at the same time get your fix, where you can rent an office for the day or use their impressive humongous colour printers. The space was to die for, I'd gladly move there if only the ground floor, including the coffee machine, could be my home. I'd even overlook the fact that I would never again understand a word people say.

Coffee, sandwich and a very punchy cardamom bun swallowed down, I remembered those 'sale' signs I rampaged past earlier. Hmmm. But I did quite fancy a pair of the lovely wooden clogs I saw all the girls wearing earlier. I knew it's not what Lisbeth would do. Unless she needed a disguise. Brilliant idea; a Swedish disguise is what I would get. One pair of clogs and some nice reduced bits at the local Acne studio later, I blended in perfectly. You could put me in the middle of Stockholm and no one would be any the wiser. In fact, I was in the middle of Stockholm and people kept asking me things in Swedish. Mission accomplished then. As long as I'd keep my mouth shut.

The Swedish disguise clogs. Cute, no?

Dropcoffee, Tjärhovsgatan 5, 116 21 Stockholm, dropcoffee.se