It's interesting to see such mixed reviews. I just spent a couple of days there with my wife, and we were both favorably impressed. Viewed from either side of the Danube, the city offers visions of beauty that I haven't found elsewhere in Europe. (And I'm not just talking about the Hungarian women, whom the other reviewers have rightly praised.) The city's tourist attractions have not been fully exploited yet, as they have in Vienna or Prague; few of the monuments are restored or even marked, which has the advantage of deterring visitors from looking at them. So the city isn't quite as swarming with tourists as you'd find in other European capitals. I noticed that, in the reviews below, the personality of the city's residents seems to be a major object of dispute. Since I don't know anyone there personally, I can't really speak to this question, but I can say that we were treated well there. However, I could also see that without money we would have been regarded completely differently, since the residents (understandably) want your tourist dollars. Some reviewers recommend learning some words of Hungarian to get better treatment, but that's easier said than done (or easier to intend than to say), since it's not possible to pick up even the simplest words without a lot of effort: the language is regularly ranked among the world's five most difficult. I tried, but I definitely failed to make myself comprehensible at even a basic level. One last linguistic curiosity to be aware of before you go: the vast majority of the tourists in Budapest are neither American nor British, yet English is the lingua franca, so the English most people are speaking won't be the same as yours. You need to speak humbly and simply to get respect; don't unleash a torrent of Americanisms on people. You can relate well to the older Hungarians in particular if you speak German.