I should have known the holiday was going to be memorable when I got my first German lesson from a petrol pump in Flensburg. There I was, convinced I could fill up the hire car using nothing but confidence and a GCSE memory of "bitte," only to discover I'd been pressing the help button for a solid three minutes and summoning a very patient attendant named Klaus. He arrived with the weary smile of a man who had rescued many Brits before me, explained the machine in perfect English, then added, "You are going to Olpenitz? My brother fishes there. He is also named Klaus." I found this so delightful that I forgot to take the nozzle out of the car and nearly drove off with it.

The Ostseeresort Olpenitz sits on a narrow spit of land where the Schlei fjord meets the Baltic, and my little holiday home turned out to be one of those modern timber-clad numbers with enormous windows facing the water. I was still wrestling my overstuffed suitcase up the boardwalk when a voice called down from the neighbouring deck. "You have brought the English weather with you, yes?" This was Gudrun, seventy-ish, permanently encased in a quilted jacket the colour of boiled sweets, who informed me she had been coming to Olpenitz since before the resort existed, "when this was just rabbits and angry farmers."

She insisted on helping me with the case, which immediately split open and deposited my swimming trunks onto her balcony. She held them up with the solemnity of a coroner examining evidence. "For the Baltic? You are optimistic. Or German. We swim in anything. You will learn." She was wrong about that, but right about everything else.

The resort itself has that slightly surreal quality of planned seaside communities, all clean lines and Danish-influenced architecture, but it was the people who gave it texture. At the little shop near the marina I met Dieter, who ran the bread and newspaper concession with the intensity of a man managing a casino. He refused to sell me a croissant until I could pronounce "Schleswig-Holstein" to his satisfaction, which took four attempts and a small queue forming behind me who offered increasingly unhelpful pronunciation tips. "Better," he finally conceded, though his expression suggested I'd merely progressed from catastrophic to merely unfortunate.

That evening I walked along the dyke path toward Kappeln, watching the light do extraordinary things across the Schlei, and encountered a man walking three enormous dogs who introduced himself only as "the other Klaus." He was not, he clarified, the petrol station Klaus's brother, but a third, unrelated Klaus who also fished. "There are many Klauses," he explained, as if this were a natural law I should have known. He pointed out the spot where the porpoises sometimes came in, told me the best place to buy smoked fish was from a woman in a caravan near the bridge, and confided that he had voted against the resort being built in 2014 but now rather liked having people to talk to. "Even English people who cannot say Schleswig-Holstein," he added, proving that news travelled faster than I walked.

By the time I fell into bed that first night, still smelling of the sea and slightly overwhelmed, I realised something. I had come to Olpenitz expecting the Baltic views and the crisp northern air, but what had actually arrived was a cast of characters who seemed to have been waiting specifically for me to be slightly incompetent in their vicinity. Gudrun had already invited me to breakfast the next morning, Dieter had promised to find me a newspaper with more pictures than words, and the other Klaus had made me promise to look for porpoises at six in the morning, which he described as "not early, just German."

I lay there listening to the water moving against the shore and thought about how often I plan holidays around what I will see, when what I actually remember is who I meet when I'm not quite managing things properly. The swimming trunks were still on Gudrun's balcony, presumably being judged. I would collect them in the morning, probably with commentary. For now, I was content to be the slightly lost English person in a world of Klauses, letting the quiet competence of northern Germany gently surround my complete lack of it.

The porpoises, I should mention, did not appear at six. But Klaus number three was there with coffee, which was better.