Budapest is lovely - really is a beautiful city, wall to wall historic buildings and architecture mingles with a smattering of modernisation. It's a delightful mixture and the Hungarians gets the mix absolutely spot on in my book.

It's a huge city, a lot bigger than I thought, I'm told it's Europe's 9th largest, and so will be up there with London, Paris, Rome and Moscow etc insofar as size is concerned. There is, and needs to be, a large extensive public transport network. First of all, all journey's cost the same 350HUF but if you but a book of 10 tickets it only costs 3000HUF and it's worth it actually to do that. Also there is a 24 hrs ticket for 1650HUF and that's also good value. All ticket machines are modern and tickets can be bought in your own language, there are UK flags, German, Japanese, in fact there were about 7 or 8 different languages you could chose from to buy your ticket. There are ticket inspectors at the entry to the metro so you cant skip the fare or plead ignorance.

4 metro lines, and then there is an old but very able 1970's style overground rail network. I also used the trams which are everywhere and lastly the buses are also brilliant. As I said, Budapest is huge, but with the scope and distance the public transport covers, travelling tourists should be fine to get from A to B. Getting to the tourist destinations by public transport could be a mission though if you are intending on seeing everything in one day sort of thing, then you have no chance via public transport. One of them Big Bus Open Top Deck type of things will be best I'd say, for the independent traveller, you really dont have much chance to see Budapest at its best via public transport.

They use yellow New York style taxis - I hadn't got off my train at Keleti Station before I was asked if I wanted at taxi. After the Bratislava incident I think I've developed a phobia if taxi drivers. I'm told they are very nice taxi drivers, but I thought it too much they wait at the door to the train to try and grab customers.

We had friends who were local to Budapest and so we were really lucky as they would drive us all over the place.