Ostsee Excursion: Zingst, Darss and a Dash of FKK

I spent last weekend at the Baltic Sea (that's Ostsee, or "East Sea," in German). As relaxation getaways go, it was a small one (Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon) but it was a very good decision.

It proved easiest to be based in Zingst, part of a long, narrow barrier almost-island, and also the name of a hopping little tourist town with a stretch of sand beach and all the attendant trappings of a German seaside tourist town. (These consist largely of numerous iconic "Strandkorb" chairs, a kind of beach chair/shelter that can be rented for the day on windy German beaches.)

Here's the pier at Zingst in the early evening:

Zingst was not really the point, though; the point was the day I spent with a rented bicycle, crisscrossing the middle part of the peninsula, known as Darss, much of which is a national park.

First, out along the bike path that runs east-west atop the dike paralleling the dunes and the sea, then through the woods and out to the great, flat stretch of Nordstrand (North Beach) at low tide and high noon, where jellyfish lay stranded at the tide line and mussel shells crunched underfoot, the sea, sand and sky all flat as glass.

Then further on foot through the national park, a looping trail through marshlands and dunes that finally opens out to the wild, untamed beach at Darsser Ort. (I'd been here once before, in deepest winter my first year living in Berlin, and this spot where the path crests the dune and opens out to the sea is the image that has always stayed with me from that visit.)

Then, the afternoon at Weststrand (West Beach), reached by a path through the woods and cheerfully dotted with colorful beach tents and windscreens.

What I loved possibly the most about Weststrand was the way East Germany's well-established "FKK" (nudist) culture plays out here. On the more established, tourist-town beaches, there are posted signs for nudist or non-nudist beaches (the latter are called "textile" beaches, in a charming nod to how normal the non-textile alternative is), but at the more remote Weststrand, everybody mixed easily. About half the people were walking around with clothes on and half with none, and nobody cared in the least either way. As an American, coming from a culture that can still be insidiously Puritanical, despite the actual Puritans being centuries gone, that just seems like a very healthy culture to me.

(Equally charming was a boy of maybe 6 or 7 I saw playing on the beach, completely absorbed in some sort of driftwood fort he was building and just as completely indifferent to the naked adults around him.)

Then in the evening back to Zingst, and here, have a special bonus of an awesome playground near the school there. (That's a dragon, a unicorn and some sort of over-sized percussion toy/instrument, in case you can't tell. Someday maybe I really will make an album of all my pictures of awesome Germany playgrounds.)

Then back to Berlin late on Sunday, rested and soaked with sun and sea, and finding a weekend away very, very worth it.