>We have these showers. You unscrew the shower head you have and screw the new one on. Some of them have adjustable heads for a "shower massage."

That's still the fixed one, though it moves a little and can be adjusted. The one I'm talking about one holds in hand; it's connected to the faucet by a piece of hose, 3-4' long, in metal spiral or plastic sheathing. The handle has the head pointing sideways, so if you point it to your ears, it really looks like a phone - that's why they call it like that.

They may be forbidden here by the (in)famous Building Code. I haven't seen them anywhere, except maybe in foreign movies. Not even in junk mail (which I'm getting a lot - and which is fun sometimes :).

>My impression of what transplants miss from home is usually 1. Food (as you mentioned) and 2. religious services in their native language.

As Salman Rushdie would have put it, one who cooks puts a lot of feeling into the food, and eaters feel it; national cuisine does bring you the collective mentality of the nation, in a way. But then, we did manage to rebuild practically everything we had at home (considering food), and some things are actually finally beginning to look right, because we put proper amounts of meat and other ingredients which were rather just seasoning back home.

I also didn't mention bread (other than rye, which was my biggest single expectation turned down) which is in general in completely different category from what we're used to (practically unusable without a toaster, too soft, no crust), because it's so easy to bake your own.

As for (2), I would never notice :)

p.s. I'm probably eating up my non-technical-messages-quota for this month today...