For most of the people who live here, and perhaps even a higher fraction of tourists, Barcelona never needed to make a comeback.

But my wallet was stolen here, and I was inconvenienced by a wildcat transit strike, and I was a bit down on the place.

It rallied today, in a couple of ways.

1. I took the bus tour of the city.

2. I had a very nice meal at a trendy restaurant.

Bus tours are underrated. They seem like the sort of things non-worldly people would do. Pensioners from Minnesota. Newly  substantial folks from Guangzhou.

They get on the bus, and sit in the open-air deck, and have someone tell them what they are looking at as the bus crawls around town.

I have been a few places, and I now concede that, yes, if you are new to a city and it offers a bus tour … you probably should take it on your first or second day there. Get a sense of what is where, and what looks interesting.

I did it on Day 5. I wish I had done it sooner. Even at about $30 a head.

The tour bus here works like most of them. You get a headset to listen to commentary. It stops regularly. You can get off the bus and get on the next one. Over and over.

In that way, I got to the funicular which takes people to the top of Mount Tibidabo, the highest point in the city, and a place (oddly) referred to in an episode of Friends.

Great views. A closed amusement park. Back on the bus. Through a nice residential district in the foothills. Down to Camp Nou, where the three people with me had never been. Into a thriving business district (where we had Iberian ham sandwiches).

Switch of buses. From the blue line to the red. Which took us to the older parts of the city. Around and over Montjuic, where I flashed back on the 1992 Olympics. (The main stadium was there, and the swimming venue, and climbing the hill from the main press center, on the flat.) Down to the port. The cruise ships parked there. Past the yacht clubs and over to the aquarium. Past the working part of the port. Around the tall statue of Christopher Columbus.  Over to the beach in Barceloneta. Past the Olympic Village.

Up through the Gothic Quarter, to the central Placa de Catalunya, up the high-end shops of the Passeig de Gracia and past the Hotel Majestic — where the previous night we saw the Dallas Mavericks entering the lobby after (apparently) having dinner. (Dirk Nowitzki does stand out in a crowd.) The Mavericks lost to Barcelona’s team a night later.

And then we alit. And walked back to the apartment. Having a much better sense of the city.

The second part of the comeback was the dinner reservation at Cal Pep … where we had a memorable meal at a hot-among-the-foodies place.

It was one long series of tapas plates. In this order: Sardines and red pepper on toast, chicken croquets, tortilla with potatoes, ham and onions; Iberico ham (on bread with tomato sauce), mixed fried seafood (sardines, shrimp, calimari), piquillo (green chilis), steak chunks and fried artichokes, sausage stuffed with foie gras on white beans; monkfish and vegetables and, finally, pastry with Catalan cream foam.

With two bottles of cava (Spanish bubbly) and two of red, and that was it. More than enough.

We finished off the night with a glass of Port at a little taverna next door, and we struggled on home … and Barcelona seemed a much nicer place than it had a few days before.