The dog park

I took some pictures of the dog park today. They're not great, but I thought they might give you an idea of the size of it. It's the biggest dog park I've ever seen, so no wonder it's mostly crowed by big dogs.

Here is a picture of the entrance:

Of course we don't usually let Papu to run freely. It's not even allowed in Finland when you're in the suburban area. We just let her off the leash when we're close to the dog park. She's so excited to get there that she pulls a lot. It's easier to let her to run freely than trying to keep up with her pace.

The dog park sign has been sabotaged one time too many. It's supposed to say "Hatsinan koirapuisto", which means "Hatsina Dog Park" in English. It also says the same thing in Swedish, since Finland is bilingual.

Here is one corner of the dog park. This is what I see when I'm standing in the middle of the dog park. Multiply that with four and you get the idea of the actual size of the dog park. The black dot in the middle is Papu.

There is also a nice tree area in the park. It looks pretty innocent, but we humans don't usually go there because it's full of nettle and other not so nice weeds. The picture also shows the nice sand road that goes through the dog park. You can see the same road in the picture above too.

Here is the view from the opposite gate. It's so big that there has to be two gates. This picture also shows the nice bench area in the middle of the park. I didn't take pictures of that, because there were people sitting. I'm sure that they wouldn't have minded of me taking pictures, but I'm not sure how they would have felt about ending up in my blog.

We found a new dog park just the another day. It's considerably smaller than the Hatsina dog park, but it seems to be popular among small dogs. We've been there twice now, and Papu have already made several new small doggie friends. She played and ran with them, which was really refreshing. She don't play often in the Hatsina dog park because the dogs there are so much bigger than her. We are going to visit the new dog park more often in the future, so Papu could play more with the other dogs. We're not ditchting the Hatsina dog park though. The people and the dogs are so nice there, and we kinda like the attention Papu gets simply because she's usually the smallest dog there. Papu is also good friends with the other dogs, so we want her to meet them too.