Prepare to be pleasantly surprised when you visit Poland – and that’s a profound understatement!

Now, look, I can’t claim to be an expert on this Slavic country after spending a mere five days there on a Jet2 ‘citybreak’ - but I will say everything about it impressed me and made me want to return for more.

Kraków is self-evidently a beautiful city, clean, graffiti-free and safe, and local people are charming, courteous, well-spoken and, by and large, highly educated. If you want to bring it to a standstill, just approach a zebra crossing. Then, as if by magic, all traffic freezes, cars, buses and trams are suddenly bound by a spell. So polite are their drivers, they stop at a very respectable distance and wait impassively for the crossing to be entirely devoid of humanity.

The trams, free for people of my age, are crowded but frequent. My wife had only to step aboard to have everybody else springing up to offer their seat. Bizarrely, as it seemed to me, they were doing the same for me, which meant I spent the journey suffering – irrationally – a bout of impostor syndrome. If only we might see ourselves as others see us! In this, and in so many other ways, as English people remarked, it was like stepping back in time to an age we have lost.

I had intelligent conversations with taxi drivers, waiters, and bar staff about football and food, politics and piwo (beer), and the important things in life. They addressed me politely, saving less formal terms for people of a younger generation. They had the sense, then, to modulate the register, which evidently those who work in my bank, who habitually address two late-septuagenarians as ‘guys’, do not possess.

The articulate, well-grounded people I met in the leisure industry had traditional Catholic names which they did not feel the need to shorten or Americanise. Neither did they try to distinguish themselves with tattoos, asymmetrical haircuts or pins and needles. The women had a prejudice for not bloating their faces with Botox or sabotaging the knees of their jeans. Grunge has apparently passed them by.

We stayed at the Columbo Hotel, moderately priced and ‘city style’, on the fringes of the fashionable Kazimierz neighbourhood, the former Jewish quarter, two tram stops away from the central Old Town. They provided a very decent buffet breakfast. Most nights we dined in nearby restaurants on local food. A three-course meal for two, plus my usual 3 large beers (Żywiec, Żubr or Lech), costs in the region of £60, assuming about 4.5 zloty to the pound.

On the first morning we familiarised ourselves with the city by taking the full 2-hour tour by taxi at a cost of £45 per person. Max, big and burly and Ukrainian by birth, spoke decent English to personalise the piped commentary. We began, naturally, in the Jewish Quarter and lingered on the street with restored Jewish shopfronts and kosher restaurants, threaded our way between and around six synagogues and two cemeteries before halting in Plac Nowy, the marketplace. It was like a living pre-Holocaust museum, and the frivolous thought struck me: it would make a perfect film set for many an Alan Furst wartime spy novel.

Here, Helena Rubenstein, famous founder of the cosmetics firm, was born and lived for the first 30 years of her life before emigrating to Australia, taking with her grandma’s traditional recipes for beauty cream. She died in New York sixty years later, one of the world’s richest and most successful businesswomen.

Most moving was Plac Bohaterow Getta, a large square occupied only by 68 empty metal chairs, one for every thousand Jews uprooted from here, most of whom died in concentration camps.

On the opposite side of the River Vistula (‘Viz-va’), we stopped outside Schindler’s Factory Museum, where Oskar Schindler and his Jewish employees worked. It’s still a gloomy industrial area in the shadow of a railway underpass. On a circuitous journey to the Old Town, we took in the lively, high-end shopping area of modern Kasimierz - and stopped at more beautiful old churches than I can remember.

Over the rest of the week, however, we had ample time to explore the Old Town’s cobbled streets and historic buildings, which mercifully were not destroyed by the occupying Germans or the liberating Russians. Pedestrianised for the most part and flat, they are a delight to amble through, especially beautiful under lights with a soft snow falling.

At the heart of this UNESCO World Heritage site is the main square, Rynek Główny, some 40,000-square feet of restaurants, museums, bars, shops, hotels, and iconic landmarks, like the Gothic spires of St. Mary’s Basilica and the Renaissance Cloth Hall, Sukiennice, now a popular shopping arcade. On the opposite side and impossible to overlook is the disembodied Town Hall tower, sadly all that remains of the 15th-century town hall.

We spent the next day, Budget Day in every sense, keeping out of the heavy snow tram-hopping, getting on and off as fancy told us, crisscrossing the city, and riding to the end of the line. This way we were able to see the suburbs, where block after block of concrete towers lined up to provide accommodation for workers. These relics of the Communist regime are still identified by number rather than name.

On Wednesday we drove south by minibus on an organised trip to the snow-drenched Tatra Mountains – ‘a winter wonderland’ in most people’s assessment – stopping en route at a remote farm to taste slivers of piquant cheese with the option to go round the back and smoke it yourself on a flaming grill. Of more personal interest was the visit to the Museum of Zakopane Style, at Villa Koliba, built in the 1890s, based on a design by the artist, Stanisław Witkiewicz, to celebrate the highland region’s unique culture and folklore.

The highlight of the day, though, was hopping aboard the funicular railway to Gubałówka, the highest peak in the Tatra range. From the top, through a curtain of snow, was an awe-inspiring panorama of Zakopane, the region’s capital, stretched out below. The air, biting clean and fresh, seemed to stimulate the appetite.

After a high-altitude pizza and a nice Tatra Jasne Pełne, a classic Polish pale lager (“it would have been rude not to”), we descended to Zakopane and strolled the not-inconsiderable length of the single shopping street. It put me in mind of an upmarket Austrian ski town, except there were no obvious pistes or skiers in the region.

Thursday dawned bright and clear, and we walked the entirety of the Planty Gardens, just under 3 miles, which encircle the Old Town. Formerly the city walls and moat, it is now a delightful place for a quiet stroll, passing the Barbican and under the shadow of Wawel Hill, on top of which squats the magnificent 14th-century Wawel (‘Vah-vel’) Castle. It’s a bit of a climb, but the views from the top, not least of the snaking river, are worth the effort even if time does not allow a full inspection of its numerous treasures.

We were not being picked up for the airport until 4pm on Friday, so there was plenty of time to go into the Square and see the grand opening of the Christmas Market. All week there had been signs of its approach, but overnight the place had been well and truly transformed in traditional fashion, the wooden huts seasonally trimmed up in a way most welcome at this time of the year, not so perhaps at other times. This was the heady, full-on version, unlike the muted efforts in many European cities, which currently have safety concerns.

I would have been tempted by the street food and spicy mulled wine had we not already decided upon a visit to the rightly famous Restauracja pod Aniolami (‘Under Angels’). It’s in a deep romantic courtyard just off the main square, and its proud boast is it specialises in mediaeval noblemen’s cuisine, particularly grilled meat and trout. So by candlelight, we dined richly and leisurely on an array of dishes that were unpronounceable but delicious. We tasted the real Poland, I fancy, and were served by the lovely Klaudia, who spoke fluent English and was hugely informative and attentive to our needs. With a plane journey ahead followed by a two-hour drive, I forewent the beer, and the gastronomic experience was none the worse for it.

I first met Polish people in the late 1960s. My best mate – sadly long departed – was a Catholic and knew several of them from his church. They invited us to the Bradford Polish Club to play chess and were delighted to beat us. They were great blokes, competitive, gregarious, hard-working and fun-loving. They were also very emotional and could get a tad tearful about their homeland around nine o’clock after a few beers, especially when their football team had lost.

Sadly many of the values I remember from that time seem to have disappeared in England. It was a pleasure to find them still at the heart of Polish society. I hope to return. It won’t be my fault if I don’t.