One of the key reasons for moving abroad is to experience a culture alien to your own. To think, eat, act and speak differently to the way you do at home. Despite that, there are times when the differences get to you and you just want to go where everybody knows your name – or can at least pronounce it.

We’re talking, of course, about the expat community, a vital lifeline in a new city. Don’t know where to get decent wine? The expats do. Can’t find a bar that shows rugby? The expats will be showing it at their place. Haven’t got a clue which dry cleaner to trust with your good shirt? You know who to call.

In Bombay the expats fall into one of two discrete groups. On the one hand are those here at the behest of foreign banks, funds managers and other multinational behemoths. While their numbers have taken a hit recently due to the overzealous and unscrupulous shenanigans of their financial brethren, they still form a sizeable community in the city.

Their domain is south Bombay, the financial hub of India’s financial hub. Places such as the private Breach Candy Club and the swanky bars of the five-star hotels are the playgrounds of the seriously wealthy expats-on-a-package. Their air-conditioned penthouse apartments overlook the ocean and domestic staff look after everything from boiling the milk to babysitting.

Weekends are spent at charity golf events and bidding at charity auctions, while their partners spend weekdays lunching, shopping and doing more charity work.

It’s a world neatly summed up in an invaluable expat guidebook published in the city. It helpfully advises that the best way to get many small jobs done – from paying bills to buying stationery – is to “ask your driver”.

Of course, this works for the expats-on-a-package, who have a driver and car included as part of their job description; along with private schools for the kids and someone to walk the Labradoodle. The second class of expats do have drivers, they just tend to be rickshaw wallahs who operate three-wheeled death machines rather than shiny, white four-wheel drives.

These expats-without-a-package have landed here under their own steam and tend to live further out in the burbs. Young and usually involved in some form of creative industry, they tend to cluster around the eminently fashionable northern suburb of Bandra. While the packaged expats spend their days making (or possibly losing) vast amounts of cash, their unpackaged fellow countrymen and women spend their days hanging out at the local bagel shop.

Apart from offering comfortable chairs, good coffee and great bagels, the place also has free Wi-Fi, which means it’s a de-fact office for every self-employed photographer, web designer, indie film director and freelance journalist in Bandra. Handily, the place is also jam-packed with plenty of under-employed expat writers, artists, models and actors looking to update their Facebook, blog and Twitter accounts. Hang around long enough and someone will probably offer you a job in their latest venture.

Having come here under our own steam, but working for foreign outlets, we straddle both groups and tend to spend days at the bagel shop and evenings at bars in the south. It’s a good way of getting the best of both worlds.

But after a while it’s time to put the Aussie flag back in the drawer, jump in a rickshaw and go where nobody knows or can pronounce your name – just to remind yourself why you came away in the first place.