Review of Tea Garden Spa

The Tea Garden Spa is located about 15 minutes from Kiryat Gat. It is a Japanese-style tzimmer with small wooden, beautiful huts, landscaped gardens, en-suite Jacuzzis and sauna, A/C, and cable TV. Each room also has a little fridge, a kettle, coffee, and tea. When we entered the room there was a pot of green jasmine tea (according to my super taster tastebuds) heating over a candle with two adorable Japanese teacups nearby. In the fridge was a pitcher of water and two ice cold glasses of lemonade.

Sounds idyllic, right?

Well it was certainly...um...quaint, but it was far -- very far -- from idyllic. 

Let me count the ways:

1. Our bathroom -- Our room bathroom did not have a door. Yeah, you read that right. It had a wall separating it from the rest of the room, but only on three sides, the fourth side was open, so if you were sitting on the toilet, you'd see right into the shower, which was located in the corner of the room (also not in its own room). And the interior wall that separated the toilet from the rest of the room didn't even go all the way up to the ceiling -- it stopped a few feet before getting all the way up there. Plus, I had to ask for toilet paper.

2. The shower -- The shower had a curtain, but no liner. Water got everywhere. They supplied dinky little packets of shampoo+conditioner. After extended Jacuzzi use, I needed moisturizer!

3. The bed -- It was a double. That's small for one and a half large people (is that a good way to describe us?).

4. The lamps -- First off, there were no night tables, so the lamps (large, Japanese lantern-style lights) were on the floor (that's fine). Now, if you're not going to have a normal light on a night table, you should at least make sure that the lamp is turn-off-able by hand from your bed. These had foot peddles as switches. So you had to get out of bed and step on the switch to turn it off or on.

5. The coffee -- But where's the milk? Or at least the powdered creamer?

6. The sauna -- The switch to the sauna was outside, around the back of the cabin. And who wants to sit in a boiling hot cubicle in the dead of summer??

7. The massage -- Because Menachem declined his 1/2 hour massage (part of our package deal), I got a four-handed massage. Parts were good, parts not so good. It's hard to focus on the intense pleasure of a shoulder massage when someone else is digging her pointy fingers deep into my thigh fat. I have bruises to prove it.

8. The cheese platter -- This consisted of a portion of goat's milk cream cheese, a portion of olive cream cheese, and a portion of sun-dried tomato cream cheese. There were also olives and crackers. It was tasty, but come on -- that's not a cheese platter. The wine was Young Selected. We love that sparkly soda-like wine, but I imagine that more sophisticated people may scoff at that wine choice.

9. The TV -- It was too small. And Israeli cable is stupid.

***

That being said, we had a wonderful, relaxing time. Complaining about this odd place was good fun and we had excellent, excellent meals at nearby restaurants (review of one to come).