Hello from Greece, the country of wealthy!

A very good answer would be to ask her to come and live in Greece for two years, but to save her the shock... I will share a few sporadic thoughts.

The official unemployment rate among youths (below 32 IIRC) it's 50.60% today. Given the fact that part time jobs like working as a delivery boy counts as employment for the prior government, you can rest assure that finding a steady salary in Greece these days is extremely hard.

In the private sector almost no one is going to give you a full time job. If they do, you're expected to work at least 10 hours per day, maybe more, while you're officially paid for ~ 8.

The local social security found takes a large cut of your salary ~ 30%. Then you are taxed. Last year taxes rose at incredible levels. People lost their houses because by governments math, if you owned a house at some remote location, mostly parent's heritage, theoretically you had a income even though you resulted as unemployed. This led to extremely tragic situations where people became homeless overnight. There are other taxes like these that add up to your electricity bill. Can you imagine living without electricity? What would you if you had to choose between having EUROs but not having electricity at home or having Drachmas and having electricity at home?

Although in current Greece you pay a large amount of your income to social welfare state, that's totally inexistent. You have to double pay for your child's school, because he will never get into the University if he doesn't take extra (private) classes. You have to double pay for your health if a member of the family has a problem. Drugs became increasingly more expensive, although the prices of the actual drugs in many cases where slashed, because of added taxes at every drug prescription.

In Greece we had ~ 7.000 suicides in the last 6 years. We became from last country in suicides, to first in the EU on average, within 6 years.

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That's only the tip of the iceberg. Greece, is a third world country right now and the population is suffering. That's why a large % of the population doesn't care much about staying in the EUR or not.

Also note that among the Greek population there's a feeling that Brussels and Germany is heavily corrupted[1]. Indeed the fact that Berlin and Brussels so openly support the governments and oligarchs who created the financial crisis in Greece instead of punishing them, says a lot IMHO about their real interests. Most of the bail-out money went to French and German banks who held Greek Bonds.

So the private banks got away with high-yield Greek bonds while the Greek and German tax-payer had to pay the difference.

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Now that said, it's not like everything is Greece was okay. We have an extremely awful local elite who act as an oligarchy. Indeed Varoufakis refers to them as "Oligarchs", because that's what they are. In Greece we never had a justice estate. I don't know how are things in Latvia, might be better or worst I don't know, really I don't.

Anyway Greece needs restructuring. It needs a wages alignment, but if anything, the average wage has to go up not down.

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In view of current events, are you sure that entering the monetary union, was a good move in the long run for Latvia? I mean Czech Republic didn't enter the EURO nor Switzerland. I see them both extremely happy that didn't.

[1] https://anestis.quora.com/Links-to-credible-sources-about-Gr...