ships, ship's cook Johnny Hansen has been home with his family twice -- both times for Christmas.

Hansen, 32, is a Norwegian sailor, part of a long history of Scandinavian seafarers dating back 1,000 years, to when the Vikings raided the northern coast of Europe. Like those early Viking explorers, the 6-foot, heavyset, brown-bearded Hansen wants to travel the world.

Immediately after each job, whether it be on a transport ship carrying cars, like his first job, or on a traditional windjammer sailing school, like his current job aboard the Christian Radich , he leaves Norway with the money he has earned and travels to the places he has not seen.

His latest US port was Boston, as the Norwegian ship joined dozens of tall ships on parade last month.

Hansen's work brought him to Kuwait, Japan, the West and East Coasts of the United States, India, Germany, and around the southern tip of Africa -- all during his first cooking job, when he was 17.

"I almost went around the world in my first months at sea,'' he said in an interview while the ship sailed from New York to Boston. "I wanted to see more and more and more.'' After that, Hansen spent vacations in China, India and southeast Asia.

"Most Norwegian people, they think the world stops at Denmark,'' he said.

"When I tell my friends about traveling on the backs of elephants through jungles or rafting 60 kilometers in Thailand, they don't believe me.'' Hansen has little knowledge of wind, sails, and ropes. Instead, each day he supervises galley cadets who make hundreds of pounds of beef and potatoes, bake dozens of loaves of bread, and fry hundreds of eggs for Christian Radich's crew of almost 100.

Hansen jokes with the galley cadets, telling them anecdotes about a sailor's life, which he loves with all its difficulties.

In the early 1980s, Hansen worked aboard a tanker that ran oil from Iran to India during the Iran-Iraq war. Every morning, he said, he would see missiles fly. He watched Iraqi warplanes sink other tankers.

In 1986, months after he left that job to travel, his tanker was sunk.

Later, he worked aboard a cargo ship that carried lumber from the Philippines and Thailand to North America and Europe. Philippine villages eventually were ravaged by a hurricane because they lacked shelter from the trees his company had cut down, he said.

"I'm not proud of working on that ship,'' he said. Hansen tried once to become a landlubber. In 1987, he went back to Norway and began a catering business. But a poor economy and wanderlust brought him aboard the Christian Radich in December, first as chief steward, then cook.

Hansen believes he will settle down someday. "Maybe 10 years from now. I don't know.'' NORWEGIAN Johnny Hansen sees the world on board the Christian Radich, above.