Bloomington is a college town in the rolling hills of southern Indiana, home to Indiana University and shaped almost entirely by it. The campus is one of the most attractive in the Midwest — limestone buildings set among old-growth trees, with the IU Art Museum (designed by I.M. Pei) and the Lilly Library of rare books as cultural anchors.
The town square and surrounding blocks have the kind of independent restaurants, bookshops, and bars that thrive in university towns. The food scene is surprisingly diverse for a small Indiana city, with good Ethiopian, Tibetan, and Korean options alongside farm-to-table places. Kirkwood Avenue, running from the courthouse square to the Sample Gates of the campus, is the main strip.
The surrounding area is hilly and wooded — unusual for Indiana — with good hiking and mountain biking in the Hoosier National Forest and swimming at nearby Lake Monroe. Bloomington was the setting for the cycling film Breaking Away, and the annual Little 500 bike race at IU, which inspired it, remains a massive local event each spring.