Downtown Wellington is fabulously grungy and grubby, daubed in graffiti and pigeon droppings. It’s also heaven for the urban wanderer who enjoys street life and street art.
In a dingy arcade made lively by a crammed pavement eatery and emporia bursting with second-hand junk, I meet a woman with a tame parrot tethered to a necklace around her neck.
 In a back street I discover a “boutique” in a tiny caravan hand-painted in pink and green and blue. I have to stoop to fit through the door. I am the only shopper and even though the owner is tucked in a corner poring over her iPad, the place feels crammed. |  Children play around the bucket sculpture fountain screaming delight as the brightly coloured buckets fill and flip, over and over again. There’s something perennially hilarious and surprising about the tipping buckets and their occasional delinquent cascades of water. |
Piped music spills from the shops in Cuba Mall and blends with the sounds of a busker playing Flamenco, Morris dancers with ribbons at knee and diners chatting in pavement cafes.
A man in dreadlocks sits patiently too, offering fortunes told with “I Ching, runes, tarot, Celtic oracle and Russian gypsy cards”. Elegant Somali women thread through the crowd alongside plump-thighed girls in short skirts.
One restaurant has chicken wire tacked over its windows to keep out marauding pigeons. Two diners stare out from behind the mesh like inmates of some brutal third-world prison.
A man in dreadlocks sits patiently too, offering fortunes told with “I Ching, runes, tarot, Celtic oracle and Russian gypsy cards”. Elegant Somali women thread through the crowd alongside plump-thighed girls in short skirts.
One restaurant has chicken wire tacked over its windows to keep out marauding pigeons. Two diners stare out from behind the mesh like inmates of some brutal third-world prison.
The back alleys are full of graffitti and dilapidated signs
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