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I said "travelling TO", and most of the time you do not need to know anything apart from the name of the city... and then I presume you have a smartphone as well. Come on.

What did you do once you arrived in Budapest? Did you do your research or did you get scammed by the taxi mafia as well?

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If you travel to Budapest from Berlin you buy the ticket from DB and the crew changes as follows: German, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian. None of the first three crews would speak Hungarian. Luckily all will be able to communicate in English.

(regular announcements oftentimes won't be in Hungarian until you are in Hungary, that depends on the train origin, but I would only expect local+English)

> What did you do once you arrived in Budapest?

You will be perfectly fine staying in Budapest with just English; you can learn hello, please, and thank you to be polite. This goes for most bigger European cities, outside of France I guess.

Even France you can survive with English, just try some French and ask “how do you say” a number of times.

French people are quite friendly if you don’t exhibit all the worst symptoms of stereotypical tourists.

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