Budapest Travel Forum

I will be visiting Budapest at the end of June for a week. As I am visiting Budapest for the first time, I would appreciate any suggestions regarding things to see and do. Also, suggestions regarding restaurants/cafes and shopping would be most welcome. I understand that Budapest is a relatively inexpensive city. One other question: are there buses to Balaton Lake and is it possible to leave in the morning and return in the evening and still have enought time to enjoy the lake area?

You could start raading the Virtual Tourist TravelGuide about Budapest. I'm sure you will find '1000 ideas' about what to do/see.
See:
http://www.virtualtourist.com/travel/Europe/Hungary/Budapest_Fovaros/Budapest-436839/TravelGuide-Budapest.html

happy travels
Jaap

hiya
hope you enjoy budapest
you have to stay off the "tourist trail" and go where you see locals going to eat and drink (although there may be more language problems this way)to get better prices - most people will understand beer ( not lager)

and have a look at byki translator ( google) for some basic words like please, thank-you, beer ,wine, water

have a good stay in budapest
Julie

Lake Balaton: the easiest way is to take a train, although there are coaches connecting the lake and the city too. You can pick basically any town or village on the southern or northern bank of the lake - I recommend you to do some reasearch on it. Begin with a map or Google Earth. The most popular resorts that are close to Budapest are Siofok, Fonyod (on the southern bank) Balatonfured and Tihany (on the northern bank). By the way, there is a constant ideological war between northern and southern bank lovers. Southern is better for families, since water depth is much lower here. And actually this is the best place to enjoy the panorama of the hills on the northern bank. However, the northern bank is great for those who'd like to swim and taste wine and it actually offers more sights to see in bad weather (or on a daytrip, in your case).
I can really recommend Csopak on the northern and Balatonlelle on the southern bank. These are all within 2-3 hours from Budapest.
If you'd like to do wine tasting too, I recommend Badacsony. It is a 4-hour train ride though from Budapest, but it's a good idea to take a train down to Fonyod (3 hours), cross the lake by ship (30 minutes) to Badacsony and then travel back from there.
There are more direct trains to the southern bank than to the northern. But you'll find more direct buses to the northern bank, as I can recall.

Here are the schedules:
trains www.mav-start.hu
buses www.menetrendek.hu (there click on Volan menetrendek; honnan means from; hova means to; date is given in yyyy.mm.dd; don't bother about other settings)