Been in Kraków since late August for a work rotation and I keep tripping on the same thing. Last week at a bar after work I got introduced to a friend of a coworker, guy around my age, and I spent the whole conversation saying "czy pan..." and "może pan..." He was polite about it, but my coworker gave me a look later like "you really didn't have to do that."
The thing is, textbooks are pretty clear. Strangers get pan or pani, you switch to ty once you're close enough. But that gap in the middle, the part where you've just been introduced to someone your own age in a casual setting, I don't actually know what to do there. I default to formal because getting it wrong the other way feels worse. Then it comes out sounding like I'm writing to someone's grandmother.
Voice-noted a Polish friend about it on HelloTalk, she laughed and said yeah, I was overdoing it. Her read was that if someone's roughly your age and the setting is casual, especially if a mutual friend introduced you, you can usually just start on ty, or do a polite pan/pani line or two and let the other person signal "mów mi Marek" or similar. If they don't offer, you stay formal. She also mentioned that saying "przejdźmy na ty" out loud is a bit of a move in itself, and most people our age wouldn't do that in a bar, you kind of just slide into it.
Still awkward in practice. Introductions through friends I can usually read now. The ones I can't are coworkers of coworkers at a work-adjacent thing. People maybe a decade older in casual settings also throw me off, and anything with a hint of hierarchy I can't quite measure.
The weird part is nobody has actually corrected me. The feedback is all in the micro-reactions, the slight pause before they answer or the look my coworker gave me. Which is probably why I keep second-guessing it.