I have a comforting relationship with the Baltic Sea. It’s far enough away from Berlin – about three hours by train to the nearest coastline – that it isn’t practical to go all the time, meaning that when I do make the trip out, it still feels like a treat. But it’s also close enough that after a particularly frustrating week, or any time when I suddenly feel that I have to leave town, the Baltic is a convenient place to flee to.

A bit more than two years ago, I discovered the perfect little Örtchen which has since become my go-to destination for whatever ails me: Świnoujście. Or, as it was known in a previous life: Swinemünde.

As the name change might suggest, Świnoujście (shwee-noh-oosh-chya) once belonged to Germany, but is now located in modern-day Poland. It makes up the eastern tip of the island Usedom (Polish: Uznam), which has been shared between Germany and Poland pursuant to the Potsdam Agreement since the end of WWII.

There are two ways to access Świnoujście, both taking about 4-5 hours from Berlin. The town is well-connected by road and rail to the German side of the island: the miniature rail Usedomer Bäderbahn (UBB) links Świnoujście to the German resort towns of Heringsdorf and Ahlbeck and runs westward to Züssow on the German mainland, with some trains continuing as far as Greifswald and Stralsund.

There are no land connections at all between the town and the Polish mainland; it is essentially the Point Roberts of Poland. The only way to reach Świnoujście from the Polish side is with a (free) passenger ferry from the train station on the opposite coast. Without a car, the only train connection to this far-flung corner of Poland is through the industrial port city of Szczecin. This was how I came to Świnoujście for the first time.

Świnoujście is laid out like a typical Baltic resort town. The area around the ferry terminal makes up the downtown, with restaurants, retail outlets, and a shopping mall. Small streets lead from the downtown core through leafy parks to a resort area filled with old villas and holiday apartments, the entire length of which is spanned by a promenade that continues west for several kilometres into Germany. The promenade is intersected regularly by paths that lead through a narrow strip of forest, over a hill, and out to the beach.

As with most significant ports on the Baltic, much of Świnoujście/Swinemünde was heavily damaged through bombing campaigns near the end of WWII. Enough of the old Prussian-style villas remain to make parts of town look and feel similar to the resorts just over the border in Germany. Nevertheless, some Communist-era reconstructions in the downtown and around the resort area lend other parts of town a cheap or tacky feel.

I first came to Świnoujście on a day trip from Szczecin, and was… entranced. I returned soon after to spend the weekend of my 26th birthday there, in order to see and understand more about this place.

It is always a pleasure to come to the coast. After long periods spent inland among the dreary concrete of Berlin – as much as I love it there – just seeing the sea again, having the chance to walk along the coast, feel the wind off the water, and listen to crashing of the waves, is deeply refreshing.

There’s also something about the Baltic Sea in particular that reminds me of where I grew up on the west coast of Canada. I think it’s the overcast skies, the changeable weather and the relative chill. Somehow the Mediterranean has just never managed to do it for me like the Baltic does. ‘The coast’ in my mind is something grey, cold and stormy – not blue, warm and placid. I love to bundle up and visit the Baltic in the off-season while the crowds are gone.

I’ve gone now twice in a row to Świnoujście on my birthday in early December and enjoyed it both times. It’s a lovely thing to get up in the morning and walk along a moody coastline from Poland to Germany and back. Every year, the Baltic swans are out on the beach to greet me; rain or snow, they’re somehow always there, waiting for company.

To tell the truth, although I have come back a number of times over the years, I have never been to Świnoujście in the summer high season. I’m not sure that I ever want to, out of fear that I might be too put off by it to ever return. The fact is, Świnoujście is several times cheaper in every aspect than any of the neighbouring resorts in Germany, and the resorts are in many ways interchangeable: they share the same beach, after all. There are no border controls, and euro is accepted in Świnoujście almost as easily as Polish złoty. So Germans flock to Świnoujście in the thousands to take advantage of the cheap prices, with the result that German is just as commonly heard on the streets as Polish, and parts of town pander shamelessly to German tourists, even in the off-season.

The overwhelming German presence in Świnoujście has its good and bad sides. In some ways, the border region of Świnoujście-Ahlbeck-Heringsdorf is a model of European integration: the two countries share a beach and resort promenade, public transport and tourist trains run between resorts across the border, and a common bike sharing system means that you can pick up a city bicycle in Poland and leave it in Germany. But the focus on integration masks the reality that this relationship is anything but equal. You can see it in the little things, like the fact that prices in Świnoujście are often quoted in euro, but prices in Ahlbeck and Heringsdorf are never given in złoty, as well as in the larger things – like the fact that seemingly most Poles in Świnoujście can speak at least basic German, while the German visitors hardly bother with Polish.

By far, the most uncomfortable expression of this dynamic that I personally witnessed was in the Grenzmarkt. The Grenzmarkt (‘border market’) is a semi-permanent flea market along the main street that leads to the German side of the island. It stretches out over more than a kilometre and appears to be constructed mostly from individual wooden booths pushed together and covered by rusting sheet metal and plastic tarps. The Grenzmarkt is the hub for Germans seeking any variety of low-quality goods at rock-bottom prices: cartons of cigarettes, off-brand alcohol, pirated DVDs, knock-off track pants. Polish sellers hock their wares in varying degrees of broken German (schöne Dame, wollen Zigaretten?) while the German visitors stroll by, unimpressed. The overall impression is grotesque: on one occasion I saw an elderly German woman snap her fingers at a Polish saleswoman, announcing, ‘I’m ready to be served now.’ It looks and feels more like a scene out of a third-world country, or at least a place that should be much further east than here.

For me, though, being in Świnoujście as a non-German visitor had a peculiar draw. This isolated, far out-of-the-way corner of Poland is not accustomed to having foreign visitors from outside Germany; by virtue of being there and not being Polish, I was therefore presumed to be ‘one of the Germans’. Whenever I attempted to speak with someone in my limited Polish or in English, they would instantly switch to German with me. Coming from Berlin, where exactly the opposite situation was an everyday frustration, this experience was surreal to say the least.

To be honest, I enjoyed it.

In Berlin, my accent and occasional mistakes mark me everywhere as ‘not German’. My foreignness in Germany isn’t something I can hide; it’s plain to every person I meet. And after spending years settling into this country, building a life for myself here, it gets tiring to be constantly asked by strangers where I’m from and how long I’m staying. So in all truthfulness, it was fun, somehow, to come to Świnoujście and be presumed to be ‘just another one of those Germans’ by people who can’t as easily identify my accent or catch my mistakes. The irony is not lost on me that it was in Poland, of all places, where I most felt like I ‘belonged’ in Germany.

The side effect of being ‘presumed German’, however, was that it drew me into this complicated German-Polish dynamic, whether I wanted it or not.

It’s only in hindsight that I realise how often, as a traveller, I have relied on the privilege of belonging to a relatively ‘neutral’ nationality. Few people abroad have strong opinions about Canadians, and this works to my benefit. Not once have I ever worried about how someone might react if I tell them where I’m from. There aren’t many harmful stereotypes out there for me to counter, and I would never expect someone to force me to answer for elements of my country’s history or foreign policy. It’s not that we’re so innocent, it’s just that hardly anyone outside Canada knows or cares.

Not so in Świnoujście. It’s not that people there have treated me badly when they think I’m German. It’s just that I can sometimes tell that my presence there isn’t as neutral as I’m used to. I do think that this awareness started at the Grenzmarkt, where I was shocked by some of the interactions I witnessed. After that, I started seeing the dynamic more and more for what it was, and I started realising that I was being pulled into it too.

I believe it was my fault for getting too comfortable with the widespread understanding of German in Świnoujście, or being too pleased with myself for playing the role of the German tourist. At some point I dropped the broken Polish and started just speaking to people there in German like the ‘other’ tourists, reasoning that it seemed clear most of the locals understood it better than English anyway. In retrospect this was inconsiderate.

It’s just little things. The last time I was in Świnoujście, I entered a popular restaurant and asked the server if she spoke English or German. She sighed in clear exasperation and muttered something under her breath, before answering ‘Ja, Deutsch’ in an annoyed tone. And just like that I felt uncomfortable, unsure what to say. My Polish is very basic; she doesn’t speak English; on a practical level, German is the only language we have in common. This is par for the course in Świnoujście. But embracing it identifies me, from the locals’ perspective, as ‘one of those Germans’ – and some of the locals clearly have strong feelings about those Germans. Stronger feelings than I’m used to being on the receiving end of when I travel. And I’m not sure anymore how to react.

I still come to Świnoujście. Of course I do. I can’t resist a cold day on the Baltic sea, let alone one in a hidden-away corner of Poland with such a complex borderland dynamic – and all that within a few hours of Berlin.

But coming here remains a strange experience. One where I can’t just sit and watch it all unfold like a ‘neutral’ foreigner, the way I’m used to – the way I like it. When I come to Świnoujście, people see me as being ‘from Germany’ with all that that implies, good and bad. And to this day, I have mixed feelings about that.