>electric kettles (just now becoming popular in US)
This came as rather a shock to me as a young person, setting foot in a New York apartment for the first time. Arguably the most civilised place on the planet, yet how does one boil water? In a pan on the stove, very strange, I thought. How on earth does one make a cup of tea? Fortunately the lack of electric kettles soon dimmed in my memory. The thing I really remember .... was my bare foot encounter with the 4 inch roaches, en-route to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I loved the way they scuttled away as I turned on the light. "Ah - civilisation", I murmured to my crunchy but attentive audience as I calculated the cost bringing forward my return ticket to London by three months and twenty seven days.
In retrospect it was a good thing that I didn't, I may have met tsuwm battling his way through the diesel fumes in London!
Next instalment, the spiders of Queensland
