Seafront Residences

"The Seafront Residences - Aberglasney, Balmoral, Blaenwern, Caerleon, Carpenter, Ceredigion, Glyndwr, Gwerin, and Pumlumon - are all historic buildings recently refurbished to modern standards. They house varying numbers of students in study-bedrooms within self-contained flats with shared kitchens and bathrooms. All the study-bedrooms are single rooms. They all have connections to the University network and the Internet. There are onsite laundry facilities."

-Taken from the Aber Uni Accommodations Page

I am ecstatic to announce that I have been offered accommodation in the halls of residence I was hoping for!  I do not yet know which hall I will be in: I kind of like the Balmoral or Pumlumon halls, just because they're names are the most interesting to me.  I faithfully await the next step in the accommodation process, which is receiving a licensing packet and completing it.  In the meanwhile, I will obsess just as I have warned you all of.

But where to begin? Google? The University Website? Or both? 

I'll admit, I was so set to get housing at Seafront, that I have already searched Google Earth for a good streetview, although I have yet to simply Google the halls.  On the other hand, I have also already searched the Uni website extensively and watched the videos, read the information, and watched the video.  Of course, I will revisit all of these pages; because, well, I am me.

For all of you, I will attempt to provide links to everything, and I will dutifully jot down the information I find most pertinent and useful to my stay in Aber.  I start where I began, on the Accommodations webpage.  The halls are five minutes from seafront and coastal paths, the Old College (the original building used by the University which now houses the departments of Welsh and Education), the town centre, and the train and bus stations.  They are only fifteen minutes walk from the top of Penglais Hill, where the rest of the departments are located along, with the student union, library, sports centre and arts centre.  This knowledge is probably most important to me, because so far in my college career, I have walked almost everywhere, and I definitely won't have a car there.  Knowing how far my housing is from the vitals of the city and school is crucial.  

As far as the residences themselves, they are one of the mid-priced halls and are actually self-catered.  This means that I don't automatically have meal plan credits to use at the campus dining experiences, and I could easily spend far too much money on eating in town every day, but these halls have full kitchens which allow residents to cook meals! I have yet to be able to do this at Alabama (mainly because it was a convection oven, which I've never used and I was terrified I was going to burn the dorms down, just cooking a pizza).  

Here is the link to the main residence page on Aber Accommodations Page: http://www.aber.ac.uk/en/undergrad/accommodation/seafront-halls/

This is a link to a video tour of Alexandra Halls: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsSXJywlpzc&feature=plcp.  Not technically seafront, yet lumped in because they are, in fact, on the seafront.  This is the foundation for my basic expectations of the halls.

Just from going through the virtual tour (it isn't all that detailed), it seems that the rooms are actually fairly large.  I just happen to be in a single room, and so I am rather stoked about this.  Another important detail about the halls at Aber is that many of them are actually flat style halls, not traditional U.S. dorms with a shared bathroom for the whole floor or even the increasingly popular apartment-style dorms that Alabama is fervently building.  I'm pretty sure that this is the most information I will gather about the halls before I arrive, but if there is more information in the license packet (doubt it) I will update this post. Needless to say, I won't care until that night before I leave when I am too excited to sleep and just want to pour over Aberystwyth stuff on and on until morning.