how to revert to earlier desktop?

I cannot deal with the strange system that limits my program / application access to the dozen or so blocks on the left of my desktop. I regularly use several programs and I need easy access to them, as well as access to and knowledge about what else is installed on the system. With this building blocks I don't even know what's installed. The older Ubuntu interface was fine. How can I revert to it and get out of this 12.04 system? There used to be a simple way to undo this and get back to the earlier interface.

Avraham Hanadari

PS Jerusalem is a city and the capital of Israel. Your making it a region is almost enough reason to uninstall Ubuntu.