I have been in India for four weeks now, and every day I stay here I find myself adapting more and more, it really feels like I've been here forever, my days of sushi eating and kimono wearing are but a distant memory.
I have now become accustomed to more and more things that are just part and parcel of Indian life. I could almost make a life for myself, as it has been so easy to fit right in.
Work is great and as exciting as ever, I'm getting used to eating curry every day and not being able to drink the water, I've found myself my own rickshaw driver who doesn't rip me off and the family I am staying with are really starting to treat me as their own.
But before you go thinking that I'll be donning my sari forever and never grace the shores of the Emerald Isle again - you are wrong.
As much as I am enjoying myself here there is one thing that I will never be able to get used to, no matter what I do and no matter how hard I try – the poverty.
Being a wealthy, cosmopolitan city, Bangalore isn't as badly affected as other places in India, so I really wanted to see for myself how bad it really was.
So I made the long, bumpy and sleepless 13 hour journey to Chennai (formerly Madras).
As I stepped off the bus I quite literally stepped onto dozens of families sleeping on the streets.
These were the people who weren't even lucky enough to make it to the slums. Children from the ages of a few months upwards were lying on dirty blankets beside their parents, some fully or half clothed, some not clothed at all, a film of dirt and grime encasing everyone.
As I stood gawking at them most of them started to wake up and I suddenly felt extremely guilty that the first thing for them to see in the morning was a crowd of tourists staring at them. Despite this, the children all managed to have a smile on their faces as one by one they approached us looking for ...well anything we could give them really. That day my friends and I bought as much food as we could for as many children as we could, content that we had done our good deed for the week.
As the day progressed and we walked further into the city, we realized that we had barely scratched the surface of the bigger problem.
No matter where we went people followed us, crying out for money, food, water - whatever we could give them.
A heartbreaking situation that you find yourself having to ignore, however difficult it may seem, unfortunately you can't help everyone and one must develop a pretty thick skin in order to ignore it.
Maybe I've been to used to the idyllic life in Japan, where there are homeless people but not necessarily beggars, the people there have so much pride that, yes they'll search through dustbins, but they will never ask another person for food or money. In India, the people relentlessly cry out to you and some of them even grab you or poke you.
That's what desperation does to a person, everything else takes second place. I certainly couldn't look at it forever.
