Israel 2023. Chapter 2: The Setai Sea of Galilee, Rooms 415 and 416. Part 1.
We stood there.
We just stood there with our bags on the curb and our hands in our pockets. Typically when you get to a luxury resort there are bellhops who greet you, take your bags, direct you to check in. Actually you get that when you stay at a Marriott. Well, there was not a soul in sight. So basically, we left sleeping Madeleine and all of our luggage on the curb and went to check in. After check in they said someone would come take our bags, but we just waited and waited. I sent Tzvi to walk to the room with Hallie and Madeleine, and eventually someone showed up with a golf cart to take our bags.
Before going any further, I should explain The Setai. The hotel is built on 80 acres (at least that’s what they said at check in) along the Kineret (the Sea of Galilee). There are a few main buildings – the lobby, the spa, the main restaurant and the bar/lounge. All of the rooms are basically freestanding villas. There are two types of villas – all along the kineret there are “Kineret Villas” that are freestanding buildings with four rooms in each building – two villas with pools downstairs and two villas with hot tubs upstairs. Below that, there are “Golan Villas” which are downhill from the Kineret Villas, and each room is a freestanding house with a pools.
Here is a hotel map for reference:
When we were booking this we knew that we couldn’t have real connecting rooms, but we asked for two rooms as close as possible to each other. What we ended up with were two Golan Villas next to each other, which means you still need to go outside and onto the main path to go from room to room. It wasn’t great, but it was okay. However, as soon as he got to the room, Tzvi’s hotel spidey-sense started to tingle and he knew that there was something wrong so he went back to the lobby and asked what rooms my parents and Austin and Rachel were in. Lo and behold, he discovered that they were in kineret villas. Tzvi then asked what the difference was between the kineret rooms and the golan rooms, other than the Sea view, and was told by the woman at the front desk, “the kineret rooms are much larger and nicer.” Note to Setai: In the future, suggest not telling your Golan Villa guests that Kinneret Villas are “nicer.”
We knew the rest of the family would have hot tubs and we would have pools (we had asked for hot tubs but they said it wasn’t possible to get hot tub rooms that were close together), but we had assumed that we would all be in the same category of rooms, because who books some family members in the nice waterfront premium rooms and the rest of the family in rooms that have a view of a bush? You can just imagine how upset Tzvi was getting at all of this. We asked if there were open kineret rooms but were told ‘of course not, it is the holiday.’ At that point we took a walk over to where my parents room is and Tzvi almost exploded when he discovered that there were actually kineret rooms that were much closer together than the rooms that we had – like there were rooms where you just literally had to cross a hallway and walk 10 steps to get to the other room. What infuriated him even more was that “Austin and Rachel’s room was just as close to my parents room as our rooms were to each other.” I don’t think that was really true – to get from one room to the other you had to go up and down stairs, and at one point on the trip Hallie got lost going from my parents room to Austin and Rachel’s. [Tzvi: Steph is right, the rooms were not closer. Our rooms were 77 steps apart. Their rooms were 81.]
Anyway, all of this put Tzvi in a pretty bad mood. Honestly I thought our rooms were pretty nice.
During this time, Robyn (our last au pair) arrived. She lives on a kibbutz about 15 minutes away and is joining us for the night, since we don’t have Inbar and someone needs to sleep with the girls in their room. It was great to see her.
My parents finally showed up to the hotel around 6:00, even though our dinner reservation was at 6:00 at a kibbutz 10 minutes away. We called and said we’d be late and they said we needed to be there by 6:30. We didn’t get there until 645. Thankfully they took us anyway.
The seven of us drove to the Ein Gev Fish Restaurant in my father’s rented 5 seater Kia. It was like a clown car. Dinner was nice and the view was great, but Tzvi was still in his mood and it was very buggy and I got a lot of bug bites. The food was good, but they didn’t have the crispy cauliflower which was the best-looking thing on the menu. [Tzvi: I wish I could’ve enjoyed the meal, but I had plunged myself so deep into depression that it would take probably the entire stay to pull myself out of it. If only I knew what was coming…]
After dinner we went back to the hotel and left the girls for their slumber party with Robyn and then went to say hello to Austin, Rachel and Kira who had just arrived. We also went for a dip in my parents’ hot tub, which was enjoyable but I think just made Tzvi even more upset that he didn’t have the hot tub. Yeah… he wasn’t letting this go.
We slept great, but the next morning we found out Hallie had woken up at 5:00am and had been up with Robyn since. Oh well. Madeleine didn’t get up until after 8:00. We all got dressed and headed to breakfast, which was a very nice Israeli buffet breakfast – typical cheeses, salads, fish, and random hot food. They were already kosher for Pesach, so no breads, but that was okay because this hotel serves kitniyot. [For those who want to understand this better, Chabad has a great piece on this here (https://www.chabad.org/holidays/passover/pesach_cdo/aid/871998/jewish/Kitniyot-on-Passover-Is-It-Allowed.htm) but the gist of it is that kitniyot are grains and legumes that Ashkenazi Jews outside of Israel do not eat on Passover; in Israel, it is very common among all types of Jews to eat at least certain types of kitniyot.] I want to point out here that they were serving decaf coffee; it was packets of Café Haag, but I was happy to see they had decaf because it’s often hard to find decaf on Pesach.
We had an 11am reservation at a chocolate factory 15 minutes away. The cab was scheduled to come at 10:00, which Tzvi had said was too early, but somehow we didn’t leave until 10:40 and barely made it on time. Austin and Rachel didn’t make it at all.
We drove to Galita at Kibbutz Degania, checked in and watched a movie about chocolate farming and production. I think they basically took someone else’s video and put their own audio track over it. The video was nice but I feel like they probably never would’ve shown you that video in America because everyone in it was probably working for two cents an hour. After the movie we went out to a room, where you don’t really see chocolate being made but you got to a room where they give you different molds and chocolate and you decorate and make truffles, and chocolate disks, and animal shaped chocolate lollies for the kids. And Hallie made a chocolate house. It was really cute. Then we had to do an animal scavenger hunt (not real animals) around the kibbutz and the prize was more chocolate.
Robyn left us to go get ready for her seder and we went for lunch at Greg in a shopping center nearby. It was fine. We then spent the afternoon doing a tour of the shopping center. We got some stuff at Steimatzky (the bookstore) including a book Madeleine loves, but in Hebrew, and then got stuff at Superpharm and a supermarket. I did spot the infamous Ben and Jerry’s Charoset flavor, but we have no freezer so it wasn’t worth buying. Maybe another year.
We headed back to the hotel, changed and went to the pool (the main pool, not our private pool, because that’s not heated and completely unusable). Hallie got fries at the pool and we swam a bit. The main pool is actually really warm and great for swimming. They were also mixing cocktails at the entrance to the hotel. You couldn’t get someone to help you with your bags, but you could get a (mediocre) cocktail.
By early evening we got ready for yuntev and seder. Just before candle lighting we took some pictures by the Kineret. The sunset was beautiful. Thank you to Austin for taking the photos, though as he was taking them Rachel stood there saying, “they’re not going to be happy with these.” You can judge.
Just like any hotel in Israel, seder was in the main restaurant and we had our own table where we could do our own seder. The room was really decorated beautifully; it was like being at a wedding. There were floral centerpieces with fresh flowers, and every table had a tall goldfish bowl with goldfish swimming in them. Maybe it was to remind us of captivity, because when we got to the part of the seder where we talked about being freed from slavery in Egypt they took away the bowls. It’s also possible our seder was dragging on and they wanted to clean up. The seder plate was fine – the maror was plain red horseradish and the charoset was a liquid date paste that looked like diarrhea, which I guess is more like real charoset and not like the apple mixture we make at home. That’s one thing I miss about seder at home. Something I don’t miss? Two seders. I can handle the charoset.
One thing to note is that we quickly realized that this wasn’t a hotel where religious people were coming for seder. There were only one or two other groups of Americans, one big French family, and the rest was all Israelis, and a lot of them were not religious, so it was just interesting that we were doing seder but then the people at the next table were on their phones.
Anyway, we did our seder and it took around an hour. Hallie did the ma nishtana very nicely, we said a few dvar torahs, and Austin did a very nice Moroccan custom he learned from Rachel’s family where he went around the table waving the seder plate over each person’s head and then kissed them on the cheek.
Finally it was time for the food. I have to say, the food was amazing. There were a lot of different stations and like half a dozen different carving stations – beef, lamb, chicken, turkey, duck. There was one station where they were literally giving out Tomahawk steaks – like each person could have their own Tomahawk steak. That’s a 40 ounce bone in steak that you’d usually pay $150-200 for. Tzvi got one that was rare and my dad got one that was well done. It was crazy. Unfortunately we don’t have photos so I don’t remember what else we ate, but it was all really good. Dessert was good – it was an array of little things and they actually set up the dessert stations around the pool which was really nice. The problem was by the time we got there it had been picked through, but there was sorbet and ice cream, which was delicious, especially for pareve ice cream.
We finished around 11 and headed back to our rooms. The kids didn’t go to bed until midnight, and because we had no au pair, Tzvi slept in the room with the girls and I slept alone in my room. Both girls wanted to snuggle with Tzvi, so the three of them shared a king bed. The girls slept pretty well, but Tzvi got up a bunch during the night to make sure Madeleine was still alive.
We got up and all met for breakfast around 10, and again, it was a very nice breakfast. Interesting that the electric fresh orange juice squeezing machine was still out and in use on yuntev…
We basically hung out at the pool all day. Robyn came to hang out with the girls and then later in the afternoon Inbar arrived. There wasn’t actually a formal yuntev lunch, which was odd, but we ate delicious schnitzel and grilled chicken and fries at the pool. It was really nice. There was also music playing at the pool, which was fine, but you’d never find that at a Jerusalem hotel. The only problem with the pool was that it was impossible to get service when you needed it. There were times when five servers would come by one after another, but then when you needed them they were nowhere to be found. At one point Tzvi ran after a man and tried to force him to take the order, but the man just stood there and showed him that he had no room left on his notepad. Also, most of the staff here are Israeli Arabs, and a lot of them don’t speak English or Hebrew, which makes it tough to communicate.
We spent some time at the heated spa pool, which was nice as it’s only for adults, and then it was time to head back to the room. While we were walking with Inbar we saw the guy who had been playing guitar the previous night. Well, it turns out his name is Eliav Zohar and he was the winner of last season’s Kochav HaBa (like Israeli American Idol). It probably didn’t hurt that his father is the Israeli Minister of Culture and Bibi’s best friend.
We didn’t have dinner plans, but as we were walking back from the pool we saw them setting up another beautiful dinner in the restaurant. There was no way the people at this hotel were doing a second seder, so we asked what it was for and they basically said it was just dinner but that there would be live music and different food from last night. Tzvi really wanted to do it. My father really did not want to eat another big meat dinner and had been looking forward to spending the evening in his room with the lights off (working – reading scans).
So… which one of them won?