Now in Tartu, Estonia. I think until this point my travels have been fairly easy to track and pretty obvious, but Tartu is a bit off the beaten path. It's Estonia's second city, with a population just over 100,000 and the home of the country's premier university.

I first thought of coming here when I picked up the Lonely Planet guide for Estonia-Latvia-Lithuania and browsed through their section on the city. Tartu didn't get a lot of attention during the Soviet occupation, and so it escaped a lot of the architectural disasters that came out of that era. Much of the city was destroyed during WWII, but the portion that remains from before that is beautiful and strikingly unpretentious. Painted wooden houses, dignified, well-kept stone and concrete ones. Open squares, quiet streets, a long peaceful park on the hill. Whereas Tallinn's old town was stunning in its medieval charm, Tartu is seductive for its 19th century simplicity.

It's also a big university town, so the younger people all know English, there are good cafes and restaurants, and the place has an energy that it wouldn't if it was filled with pensioners tired from the Communist era and rebellious youth who couldn't wait to move out. None of that, gladly. Nor are there many tourists.

The city has succumbed somewhat to the cheap, rapid commercialization that I bemoaned in the capital; there's a few big malls, a very car-friendly streetscape by the bus terminal, and a few absolutely horrible taller buildings. But that's a small part of the city, and it's still salvageable.

I like this city. I've loved Estonia too, but my bus trip made clear just how flat the country is. I never expected mountains, but I wasn't expecting Minnesota either. Oh well, you can't have it all.