This comic has some interesting cultural context that I got to read about when trying to understand it. “Book Day”, which eventually became “Book Week”, was(is?) a popular yearly event that encouraged people to read more, would feature events to meet authors, created a tradition of exchanging books as gifts, and (because of the era) was also an opportunity for the communist government of the time to influence what people were reading. https://hu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ünnepi_könyvhét
note: it looks like it IS still celebrated. Cool!
So the joke in this comic is that Jucika received a romantic “Book Day” gift, then re-gifted it to the man she was actually interested in.
As always, stay tuned here on !comicstrips@lemmy.world for a slow trickle out of Jucika comics, but if you want to find more, here’s a good post with a large collection that /u/JohnnyEnzyme@piefed.social posted last year: https://piefed.social/post/1258520
**Also, check out some Jucika fan art! https://piefed.social/c/eurographicnovels/p/2128207/the-best-of-jucika-fan-art-12-pieces-with-two-videos
I wanted to get a decent reference for it, but I’ll just throw it out there since it’s been five fucking days.
Is that why there is/was a stereotype of Finns/Estonians being slow in the USSR?
Im not an expert in the area, but I gather it’s just because the Russians consider Finland and Estonia backwaters. I’ll note that Finnish and Estonian are also non-Indo-European languages, they are in the Finno-Ugric family. So my guess is a long ways away with a rustic lifestyle and they speak funny.