First Impressions of Budapest

I'm here! First impression from the train station was - oh, here are the communist style grey cement square huge apartment buildings, mixed in with the fantastic old castles and charming Central Europe architecture. I had a difficult time finding a taxi because the signs in train station thoughtfully had a drawing of a taxi but pointed all different directions. Then the money...still confusing...hmmm.. at the ATM machine and should I opt for 10,000, 50,000, or 70,000 Forint? Good thing I brought that calculator watch. It won't help me with the piles of heavy coins though - I have no idea what 10 Forint gets me :-). I tried to hand it to someone for a bottle of water that cost 510 Forint and she waved the 10 coin away as worthless.
It is a huge city and hardly anyone speaks English (except hotel/tourism workers). I feel as a foreigner who might have landed in New York City: overwhelmed with amazing sites and don't know where to begin or how to navigate the public transportation system yet. Sure, there are books about the best things to do but there are so many delights - how to choose? So, today I'm going to walk to the castle district and poke around, especially keen to find the underground Labyrinth, then get on a "hop on hop off" bus that gives me 24 hours of driving around to all the main WOW sites and you can get off, stay as long as you like, hop on the next one (they come every 30 minutes). Includes a trip on the Danube. I'm sold. will report back on this adventure (in the light rain I might add).

PS. excuse any typos - in every country I visit, the blogger.com instructions are in the native language shown by my IP address and spell check marks 90% of the words as wrong because it is checking now in Hungarian. Still, it is interesting to see what words English and Hungarian/German/Slovenian have in common! Forint...New York City...I...hotel :-)