>>Haven't been to Hungary almost three years now, and then twelve years before that. Just like most other countries of ex-Comecon, it's heavily centralized, and probably one tenth of the people and one quarter of the money is in Budapest. So whatever you saw there may be much better than elsewhere in the country.
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>Do they still have those entreprenurial taxi drivers with non-yellow signs targeting tourists for shake-down efforts ? On my 3rd day I decided to teach them the old you can't cheat an honest man stuff - or was I exploiting them by being hard assed when not giving in to their suddenly raised prices ?

You can always haggle, unless you see he's going by the meter. In my little town (no more than 70000 people) there are at least six cab companies and a lot of solo cabbies, competition is fierce and you get between any two places in the city for up to 2€. They all drive by the meter, and then they usually round it down.

I was warned about Budapest cabbies almost 40 years ago, and now they have one more generation of experience collectively... So around town we, just took he subway or bus. And even though I speak the language, I missed out something in the instructions and didn't quite get where do we scan the tickets... assumed it was somewhere below, but it was on ground level, and so we ran into one of these guys and had to pay the fine.

Last time we were there, we only went to Szeged [seg-ed], the nearest city across the border, and we had our cab taking us across the border and then back.