Heidelberg Castle ©Russell Johnson

What do you do when you are alone during a holiday, stuck in a place that doesn’t celebrate it?  A few years ago I flew to Germany the day before Thanksgiving for a 1/2 hour business meeting. The meeting was a bust and alone, in a foul mood on a bone-chilling afternoon, I boarded a train for Heidelberg where the Student Prince was alive and quite drunk. This is excerpt from an audio book of my stories that will be released by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange on iTunes and on CD early next year.

Choirs, Coups and Long Canoes

Where do you go to find a spirited Christmas celebration? Give me Fiji any day. As the temperature teases the freezing tick on the thermometer and our two cats, Max and Moritz stalk the house looking for non-existent pools of light, my mind drifts on the trade winds to Fiji sunshine. I am a great fan of Fiji. I courted my wife on a cruise of Fiji’s islands in 1997, but ten years earlier I went there to do a documentary for American Public Radio and NPR that was supposed to have been a Christmas special featuring Fiji’s magnificent a capella choirs, but ended up as a rather strange tale of island politics: two coups d’etat, me being suspected of being CIA, a strange encounter with a drunken German arms dealer, unzoweiter, unzoweiter…but that’s a long story.

The program was an hour long, but I have shortened and updated it. A major part of the 16 1/2 minutes features the music of the Fiji islands, recorded on both trips, ranging from a Fijian drinking song to familiar Christmas carols sung in Fijian. I would guess that there are few Fijians who cannot sing…magnificently. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, peace and joy during this holiday season.

Listen MP3 16:30

What ever happened to the idea of fun candy? As a kid I used to sit around with my pals biting the heads off of giraffes and the butts off hippos, giggling self-indulgently at my cleverness. Likewise with Cracker Jacks: one always opened the box from the bottom as that where the tschotske was buried. I knew it was a plastic whistle or something similarly lame, but the adventure was in the discovery. Imagine my delight when a friend brought my wife and me a Kama-Cao chocolate bar from Galleries Lafayette in Paris.

Kama-Cao is a treat in the tradition of my childhood favorites, an X-rated one. In fact you have to be over 18 years of age to buy this adult confection (which probably means that every 12 year old in Paris bought one for his playground sweetie). Kama-Cao, by chocolatier Francis Miot, features bite-sized squares of dark chocolate embossed with positions of the Kama Sutra. Every bite is a wonder. (“I wonder how they do that.”) And, like Cracker Jacks, there is a surprise inside. Hidden in one piece is a porcelain replica of one of the poses (there is a warning on the label: “Attention de ne pas vous casser une dent en croquant.” Hey kids: be the first in your neighborhood to collect them all!

Happy Valentines Day.

A few years ago I flew from the real Bethlehem, in the Middle East, to Brazil’s Bethlehem, a town called Belem at the mouth of the Amazon where after some Christmas shopping at a funky, politically-incorrect market, I began a jungly yuletide cruise. Have a look at a Windows Media video and a photo gallery.

On connectedtraveler.com