Tigers

Three weeks ago I received a very beautiful postcard with a tiger cub.
The title of this postcard is "Bengal Tiger Cub with Mother", it was made in England, has the IKEA logo and was sent from Portugal :) Globalization.
I do like this postcard. I think that tigers are the most beautiful and strong animals. I saw a tiger when I was 3-, or even 2-years-old. I mean, I saw the tiger in the taiga, without any cage, just 3 meters away from me. (Yeah, I have a lot of recollections from that age.) My sister, her friend Ksenia and I went to the observatory where our fathers worked. We went on the left-hand side of the country road and the tiger appeared from the taiga and went on the right-hand side of the road for 5 or 10 meters. I was not afraid of her (our village was on the area in the territory of a female tiger, some years she was with a little cub), just because I was too young. But I still remember this unusual occurrence. My parents did not see any tiger in the taiga, they saw her footprints on in the snow, and saw her from the window of a bus - but she was far away on the mountain.
The first Japanese word that I learned was tora - a tiger. Just because I was at in the Far East, in Vladivostok, when I became interested in Japanese. So, the first word that came to my mind was, of course, "Ussuri tiger" (or "Amur tiger") and asked my friend.

P.S. :))) I missed only two articles! Unbelievable!

ETA. You can listen to this story about meeting a tiger in Russian at LingQ