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Kristiansand Dyrepark
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When:
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Daily
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Where:
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Kristiansand Dyrepark
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| Costs: |
NOK85-NOK225; concessions available
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| Opening Hours: |
10am (closing time dependent on season)
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As well as hosting more than 800 free-roaming animals in wide, open-space areas, Kristiansand Dyrepark is home to about 70 species of birds and has a very strong "animal-friendly" policy.
The park cooperates with the WWF, prides itself on its captive breeding rates and lets its animals frolic around at their leisure in large, open spaces. Animal species on display include birds, reptiles and mammals, but a particular favourite with the public are the monkeys. The smaller ones are allowed to interact with visitors, climbing onto people's shoulders etc.
The park has a number of attractions, including a go-cart track and a "rainforest", but its main claim to fame is that parts of the park represent a living history of Norwegian children's entertainment of the last three decades. The star resident is a chimpanzee named Julius, who became a star on Norwegian children's TV (Barne-TV) in the 1970s and 1980s for living with humans as a baby and looking cute. Today he's a testosterone-fuelled, macho patriarch-in-the-making, but hundreds of thousands of visitors still come every year to wave to him on his island, while his illnesses make the national news headlines...
A regular visitor to the park is Captain Sabretooth, a pirate-figure who appears on children's TV and in various other media. Themed shows and performances involving him and other popular Norwegian child-friendly entertainers and artists are often staged during the holiday season.
Another famous attraction is the replica of Kardemomme By (Cardamom Town), the setting of a very popular little utopian fable for children, written originally in Norwegian by Thorbjørn Egner. During the holiday season the replica city is populated by all the characters of the book, so see if you can get hold of an English translation in advance for your kids!
Finally, in the summer of 2000 a new attraction was opened, a reconstruction of Skomakergata, a fictional street that was the setting for a cherished Christmas TV series. It ran initially in 1979 and has been receiving annual (or biannual, or triannual) repeats ever since on the national broadcasting channel NRK. Stars of the series were a tuba-playing shoemaker, his animated slipper Tøfflus, the cute and cuddly population of the street and a curious series of three-minute Eastern European animations about a sandman-like character, accompanied by children singing.
Don't say we don't keep you informed.
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