Kotlin Exposed does not commit transaction

Following the example provided on Exposed I am not able to read the created tables/data outside the transaction creating it. I am using h2-in-memory database.

The exception is:

Exception in thread "main" org.h2.jdbc.JdbcSQLException: Table "CITIES" not found; SQL statement:

I have added a call to commit but this does not help. If I read the data within the transaction creating the data, as in the example on the link to github, it works fine. Here the a simplified version of it:

fun main(args: Array<String>) {
    Database.connect("jdbc:h2:mem:test", driver = "org.h2.Driver")

    transaction {
        create(Cities)

        City.new {
            name = "St. Petersburg"
        }

        println("Cities: ${City.all().joinToString { it.name }}")
        //I have added this commit here
        commit()
    }
    //I want to read the data outside the transaction, but it does not work
    transaction {
        println("Cities: ${City.all().joinToString { it.name }}")

    }
}

How can I persist the data?

Adding logger.addLogger(StdOutSqlLogger) gives the following output:

SQL: CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS CITIES (ID INT AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY, NAME VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL)
SQL: INSERT INTO CITIES (NAME) VALUES ('St. Petersburg')
SQL: SELECT CITIES.ID, CITIES.NAME FROM CITIES