Hanoi is a beautiful and lush city full of smells of coriander and jasmine and wet streets crowded with bicycles and scooters and taxis and rickshaws. It is magical. I can feel that right away. I am here meeting with our new correspondent Matthew Steinglass and with officials of the Foreign Ministry to officially register our news organization and to establish a bureau.

I am staying with dear friends Michael Sullivan of NPR and his wife Martha Ann Overland and their two children, Aaron and Nina. Michael and I go way back. We’ve known each other for 25 years — that’s how long ago it was when we both landed our first job in journalism together at a small NPR affiliate station, WFCR in Amherst, Massachusetts. Their home is a French colonial manse with an overgrown garden and a terrace that overlooks one of the small lakes that seem to be everywhere in Hanoi. From the terrace, you can see Vietnamese fisherman casting nets and working bamboo poles.

On this trip I will also be hosted by Nguyen Anh Tuan, the publisher and editor in chief of Vietnamnet, a spectacularly successful website here that has an estimated 6 million unique visitors in a country in which there are approximately 25 million people with access to the web. That is an astounding share of a market for a website and we at Global News know we have a lot to learn from Tuan. He is not only a successful businessman but he has been a courageous voice of independence in journalism. He has recently completed a fellowship at the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University and more recently has been invited to serve as an adviser on Southeast Asia to Harvard’s School of Business Administration.

Now that I can post freely, I will keep you posted on all details. More tomorrow.