Here’s a quick recipe for a successful springtime afternoon:

Buy a bucket of colorful chalk
Find a bit of empty pavement, preferably where there’s lots of foot traffic
Start drawing/writing things
Share your chalk with curious pedestrians
(Optional: give them a theme to draw about. Some will need a reason to be creative. We told our spontaneous artists to draw something answering the question “What is love?”)

*For extra spice, add a redhead!
(Yep, that’s Kyra – longtime readers might remember her from my Fulbright year in Gießen.)

You will likely encounter the following silly excuses/responses from passers-by…

“Oh, I can’t draw…okay, well, maybe a stick-figure.” (Come on, you can do it!)
“I’m not creative, but here, my son would like to draw something!” (Let’s hope his creativity stays alive regardless of how old he is…)
“Why are you doing this???” (Better question: why not?)
“Does this cost anything?” (Typical Frankfurt mentality.)
“I don’t know anything about love.” (Really? I must have mistaken you for a human being. Dreadfully sorry.)

Don’t get discouraged, after a few hours you’ll have happy pictures and positive phrases in more than a dozen languages! You might not find the answer to your question in the chalk sketches on the ground, but you’ll have brightened the day of about a hundred people, made some new friends, and given a whole bunch of tourists a reason to view Germany (well, Frankfurt at least) as a happy place ^_^