Fortunately, gone are the days when a new mom would need to lug around a carryon-sized pump that sounds like a vacuum assembly line. The newest breast pumps covered by insurance are quieter, more compact, and if you’re lucky, battery-powered. That said, they still leave much to be desired in terms of being able to go about your regular day with other people around.

Some new pumps like the Willow and Elvie are designed to provide a truly invisible, hands-free experience. The downside to those options are the significant cost, the generally weaker suction power and the hassle of charging each pump separately. The Willow in particular also includes the hidden financial and environmental cost of needing to buy custom, disposable bags.

In choosing my ideal breast pump, my list of requirements in descending order of priority were:

1. Hands-free
2. Suction power
3. Milk carrying capacity
4. Visibility
5. Cost

I’ll describe my setup and then provide details around how it performs on each of my requirements below.

Hands-free

Although the complete Freemie Liberty system (cups + pump motor) is hands-free on its own, their pump motor was still too bulky and awkwardly-shaped for my liking.

By pairing it with the BabyBuddha pump motor, which has the same profile and dimensions as an old-school iPod, I was able to achieve an even higher level of hands-free independence.

What you see here is:

BabyBuddha pump motor +
Freemie closed system collection cups

My breast pump setup allows me to work at my computer, eat a meal, and even carry by baby around while pumping.

If I wear loose fitting clothing, a casual observer would not be able to tell that I’m wearing anything underneath.

The tubing is slightly different between the two systems, so in order to get the parts to work together, you will want to switch out the two pieces of tubing that emerge from the BabyBuddha “Y” connector with the Freemie tubing. Then the Freemie tubing fits seamlessly into the Freemie cups.

Fortunately, since the collection cups are closed-system, you do not need to worry about backflow prevention.

Suction power

I heard about BabyBuddha for the first time from a fellow new mom who is a doctor. She described the BabyBuddha motor as the closest to hospital-grade suction that you could get without renting a pump from the hospital.

After comparing output from the BabyBuddha complete system versus my Medela Pump InStyle that I got for free via insurance, I confirmed that BabyBuddha helped me produce about 30% more in the same amount of time — 8oz vs 6oz total in 15 minutes.

The real test came from swapping the collection bottles that came with BabyBuddha with the Freemie tubing and collection cups. Would the amount collected decrease as a result of combining the two systems?

Fortunately the answer appeared to be “no”. BabyBuddha motor plus Freemie collection cups got me the same 8oz, maybe even a few extra mLs, in 15 minutes.

In fact, according to this mom’s blog post, the BabyBuddha has the strongest suction power of any pump on the market at a whopping max of 320 mmHg. By comparison, the Medela Pump Instyle was pulling a measly 235 mmHg max.

Milk carrying capacity

Another downside of the Willow is that you can’t pump more from each side than the size of their bags, which is limited to 4oz. This is insufficient if you have an oversupply or if one breast happens to produce far more than the other — both of which I experienced.

The Freemie collection cups can hold up to 8oz each. Even on my most productive days, I’ve never managed to overflow these cups. As an added bonus, you can pour milk from the collection cups directly into your bottles or storage bags of choice.

Visibility

I still have a dream of one day sitting at a conference table running a work meeting while pumping, and no one in the room is the wiser. My recommended breast pump system will not fulfill this dream. The Willow or the Elvie may, given how carefully they are both designed to minimize visibility.

Given the size of the collection cups, your boobs will look unnaturally perky in my setup unless you are wearing a loose-fitting shirt. I would not be comfortable pumping at my desk at work. Sitting at home at dinner with a bunch of friends that I might not know too well? Perfectly fine.

BONUS: Sometimes you need your pump motor to be visible — say when you’re fumbling around with your equipment for a middle of the night pump. Medela, Spectra, and Freemie pumps all have non-backlit displays. The BabyBuddha motor shines like a beacon of joy and hope, showing your sleep-deprivation addled brain exactly how long you have pumped for.

Cost

You want to end up with a BabyBuddha motor and the Freemie collection cups. This means that you need to buy the full BabyBuddha system with motor, flanges and collection bottles(they don’t sell just the motor) and the Freemie cups. Having the equivalent of 1.5 pump systems has its advantages as I have switched back to the full BabyBuddha system at times when the Freemies seem to collect less than they used to, in order to determine whether parts need to be replaced.

BabyBuddha complete system — At the time of writing, BabyBuddha was running a sale for $189.99 on a system that usually cost $249.99. Fulfillment and ship time can take up to 2–3 weeks, so be sure to plan ahead.

Freemie closed system cups — Make sure that you order the closed system cups and not the open system cups as the latter are an older model not compatible with the BabyBuddha. The closed system cups cost $79.95.

Your total price of $269.94 ($189.99 + $79.95) is, interestingly, lower than the price of the complete Freemie Liberty system of $299.99, which is what you would buy if you just wanted the hands-free nature of the Freemie cups without messing with hooking it up to a different motor. That said, if you prefer simplicity and are okay with a slightly higher price and a slightly bulkier motor, the Freemie Liberty system is a great choice.

So that’s my recommendation! I hope that it will help make a new mom’s life just a little bit easier.

Thursday afternoon Pacific Time

1:40pm — Depart San Francisco International Airport.

United flies a Dreamliner direct to Taipei — and there’s even Wi-Fi onboard. As of the time of this writing, you could purchase a full 13.5 hours of respectably-quick satellite Wi-Fi while flying over the ocean for a very reasonable $16. Welcome to the future.

The first key to taking an international vacation for less than the cost of a ticket to Hamilton on Broadway is making good use of credit card points.

Cost: 70,000 miles and $37. You can get these miles without ever leaving the ground. The United MileagePlus card often has 50,000 mile sign up bonuses and you can get at least another 50,000 points when signing up for the Chase Sapphire Preferred. These points can be converted 1:1 to MileagePlus miles.

Non-disclaimer: I don’t have any existing affiliation with any credit card companies. However, if you do decide to apply to any of these cards after reading this post, I would be super grateful if you allowed me to refer you.

Friday evening in Taipei

6:45pm — Arrive at Taipei Taoyuan International Airport

Landed, went through customs, withdrew money and hopped into a taxi to the city — a ride that took about 45 minutes.

Cost: $4 by bus or $40 by taxi (about 15–20% higher for an uberX).

8:30pm — Check into the hotel

The Grand Hyatt Taipei is a treat — across the street from Taipei 101 and central to several MRT subway stations.

Cost: 2 free nights + ~$275/night

When you sign up for the Hyatt Visa credit card, you’ll get 2 free nights that you can redeem anywhere in the world as a sign-up bonus. This 5-star property is a very nice place to redeem those rewards.

9:30pm — Dinner at Lin Dong Fang Beef Noodles

By this time, my body clock was waking up and demanding breakfast. Nothing better for a welcome meal than one of Taipei’s many famous beef noodle establishments. New York City has bagels, Philadelphia has cheesesteak, and Taipei has beef noodles. This dish is such a part of the city’s identity that when a (thankfully) false rumor circulated that the annual Beef Noodle festival would not be held, a near citywide riot had to be quickly calmed by the mayor.

Lin Dong Fang is an institution — and there was a line down the block at nearly 10pm to prove it. Each well-known beef noodle restaurant will lay claim to a single unique trait. Lin Dong Fang’s claim to fame is a special herb derived from Chinese medicine that they use to flavor their broth.

The second key to a ridiculously affordable vacation is to pick a place where delicious food can be had for dirt cheap.

Cost: A large bowl of beef and tendon noodle soup will set you back about $6. Your meal comes with as many small side dish items that you’d like.

Saturday in Taipei

11:30am — Breakfast at Fuhang Dou Jiang

Despite my limited time in the city, a vacation is still a vacation, and I took my time sleeping in this morning. A good thing as well, since when I arrived at Fuhang Dou Jiang for breakfast an hour before closing, there was still a line extending through the food court, down the stairs and onto the sidewalk outside. Fortunately the cashiers and chefs are well-oiled machines, and I hardly needed to wait more than 20 minutes before all of this piping hot deliciousness was mine to be devoured.

There is no English menu, so if your Mandarin is a little rusty, the items in my breakfast were:

Bing Dou jiang (冰豆漿) — sweet cold soy bean milk. This is delicious to go. Cold, refreshing and just slightly sweet.

Xian Dou Jiang (鹹豆漿) — savory soy milk soup. Definitely the most unique and delicious thing on the menu. Comes with fried bread croutons.

Dan bing (蛋餅) — egg crepe. Chewy, light and yummy.

Hou bing jia Dan (厚餅夾蛋) — slightly thicker version of classic Taiwanese flatbread. By itself, it’s a little too much bread, so I stuff it with egg for some flavor variety.

If you think you’ll be hungrier than the two of us were, you might also want to get some:

Sao bing you tiao (燒餅油條) — thin flatbread wrapped around a deep-fried fluffy breadstick. Healthy? No. Delicious? Unbelievably so.

Write down the Chinese characters on a Post-it, show it to the people behind the counter, and they’ll take care of you.

Cost: $3 for a feast to feed two

12:30pm — Taking in some cultural sights

A quick MRT ride from breakfast and we were at Longshan Temple. Entrance to the temple is free, and there is beautiful architecture inside the temple and refreshing waterfall sculptures outside. This was a blessing as the midday temperature was now over 90 degrees not counting humidity.

After spending some time here, we made our way to the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall. The climb up the 178 steps to the top was not pleasant in the heat, but once we made it to the hall, we were able to enjoy a nice cool breeze and a quiet moment to ponder the memorial to Taiwan’s most respected leader. If you arrive here on the hour, you’ll be able to see the changing of the guard.

Cost: free!

2:30pm — Mini-lunch at Jinfen Braised Meat Rice

I forced restraint at this place, since we had a dinner of epic proportions later that evening, but I would have had three bowls of this stuff if I’d had a few more stomachs. It was incredibly delicious. Foodamentals wrote an excellent review of this restaurant (which you can read about halfway through this post).

Cost: $1.50 for a medium bowl of braised pork rice

3:30pm — Picking up pineapple cake souvenirs at sunnyHills

There are many places to get pineapple cake in Taipei, but if you’re looking for the best, you have to go to sunnyHills. There’s a reason that my favorite bubble tea shop in San Francisco, Boba Guys, imports pineapple cakes from this place. They’re damn delicious, and I don’t even like pineapple.

When you go in, they’ll sit you down and feed you a pineapple cake with unlimited refills on tea. It’s a nice place to relax, people-watch or wait out a summer thunderstorm.

Cost: $20 for a pack of 15 cakes, or free if you just want the tasting

5:00pm — Back to the hotel for a nap

Jetlag was in full swing at this point, and I didn’t feel bad at all about passing out for a quick nap to recharge before dinner.

7:00pm — Daan Forest Park

The nap completely cleared my head. As a bonus, now that the sun had set, the temperature had dropped outside from a blazing furnace to a pleasant slow-cooker. We had dinner to get to, but first, a brief detour in Daan Forest Park. This place is a pleasant patch of green in the middle of the urban sprawl, and at this hour, people were everywhere — playing basketball, running around the children’s playground and walking dogs around the small pond. The park isn’t big — it took about half an hour to walk a complete loop through .

8:30pm — Dinner at Elixir Health Pot

The purpose of this trip was primarily food, and so it was only fitting to check out supposedly the best hot pot restaurant in the world. Elixir Health Pot has several locations around the city, and reservations are required at all of them. Tripadvisor has a great integration with EZTable that allows you to make a reservation online without needing to speak any Chinese. The location we went to was the most central one located at No. 124, Section 1, Xinsheng S Road. Once inside, we were seated at a private booth and wasted no time in ordering a feast that would have been better suited for twice as many people.

The quality of Elixir’s food is top notch, but what truly sets them apart from any other hot pot restaurant I’ve tried is their broth. They do not screw around. Your broth will be delicious, and they provide you upfront with additional bottles of broth base if you’re running low. And if you ever feel that the flavor of your broth has been diluted from cooking too much food, they will happily top you up with additional spices. We went for the double-broth option.

Left side: Spicy-numbing broth. Stuffed full of so many spices, I doubt that I could’ve named half of them. There were also edible goodies in there too like chunks of young bamboo.

Right side: Savory broth. I really don’t know what else to call this. Not spicy but as far from bland as you could possibly get. There’s ginseng in there, as well as red dates, scallions and cardamom pods.

They put the finishing touches on the savory broth by sliding in a sculpted mixture of tofu and ice cream. Odd and incredibly delicious. The rest of the meal passed in a blur. I definitely ate far too much, though I was far too happy to regret it.

Cost: about ~$70 per person if you’re starving like us

11:00pm — Raohe Night Market

Having eaten an absurdly large dinner, clearly the sensible thing to do at this point was to head over to one of Taipei’s premier night markets to have even more food. Shilin Night Market is bigger than Raohe, but Raohe Night Market is more centrally located. When here, take your time wandering the stalls. Sample everything that catches your eye, and let the lines of people clue you in on the tastiest treats in the market. When we were there, the grilled oyster mushrooms and fresh fruit smoothies looked especially delicious.

Cost: snacks run from 50 cents to several dollars apiece. A whole guava, peeled, cored, sliced and sprinkled in li hing mui powder goes for about $1.

Sunday in Taipei

Noon — Lunch at Din Tai Fung

I continued the trend of getting plenty of sleep, so we got an even later start to the day. Turns out that my laziness was for the best, because due to our later arrival time, there was mysteriously a mere 30-minute wait at the original Din Tai Fung. The last time that I had come here over two years ago, we’d waited over 2 hours.

The staff is efficient and attentive, and your food arrives very quickly after you begin ordering. There are now additional Din Tai Fung locations in the US, but when in Taipei, make sure to order the items that are unavailable in the States.

Cost: $6–10 per tray of 10 soup dumplings. Not cheap by Taiwan standards, but barely half the price of the equivalent orders at their US locations.

1:30pm — Souvenir shopping on Yong Kang street

We waddled more than walked out to the nearby Yong Kang street, where there were plenty of souvenir shops selling all manner of handicrafts and other endearing souvenirs.

3:00pm — Thunderstorm! Back to the hotel for spa time

At this point we hadn’t really planned what to do next, which turned out to be for the best, because at precisely this instant, the sky opened up and rain started pouring down. Fortunately uberX picks up even faster than they do in SF, and we stayed nice and dry in our ride back to the hotel.

Since there was no point in going back outside until the storm passed, we decided that a relaxing spa session was in order. The wellness center at the Grand Hyatt Taipei is delightful — with gender-segregated hot tubs, sauna, steam room and relaxation area. If you are feeling more adventurous, another great option for waiting out a storm is to head to Beitou and sample some of hot springs of that famed neighborhood at any of the dozens of hot spring hotels and other public bathing areas. I recommend booking spa time at Villa 32.

5:30pm — Taipei 101

With the storm over, we headed to Taipei 101, where we ultimately decided against going up to the observatory. We couldn’t justify the expense as we were going to get a very similar view later that night on Elephant Mountain. That said, Taipei’s tallest building, which was briefly the tallest building in the world from 2004–2009, has a very nice mall as well as convenient access to a subway station that we hopped on for our next destination.

Cost: $30 per person to go up to the observatory

6:30pm — Yong Kang Beef Noodles

One time having beef noodles wasn’t enough. We went back to Yong Kang street to sample the signature dish at a yet another Taiwan institution — Yong Kang Beef Noodles. This place started out as a mobile food stall, and they built up more and more space around it until it became the 2-story restaurant that it is now.

Compared to Lin Dong Fang’s slightly herbal flavor, this place’s bowl of beef noodles has deep, rich and extremely meaty broth. I preferred the flavor and texture of the chunks of beef here, but in the end, both places served excellent beef noodles.

Cost: $4 for a large bowl of beef noodles

8:00pm — foot massages

After a long day of walking and eating (okay, let’s face it — mostly eating), there’s nothing better than to duck into any of the numerous foot massage parlors everywhere on Yong Kang Street. For the next hour, I sighed, grimaced and yelped as a guy with forearms that looked like they were chiseled out of marble kneaded my feet and calves with unforgiving pressure. “You carry a lot of tension in your right shoulder,” he said, leaving me dumbfounded as to how he could tell that from a pressure point in my heel.

Cost: $15–20 for 40 minute massage

9:30pm — Dessert at 愛玉之夢遊仙草

This place’s name doesn’t really have an English translation. Therefore, I wasn’t sure what I would be eating when I got in the line, and honestly, I still wasn’t sure when the bowl was placed in front of me. As best as I could tell, it was a mix of chewy glutinous rice balls, fresh grass jelly, sweet azuki red beans, some other delicious and unknown items and finely shaved ice.

Cost: $1.50 for this bowl of wonder.

Another dessert option: Ice Monster for shave ice and fresh mango

11:00pm — Elephant Mountain hike

Another hour of so of wandering brought us to the Elephant Mountain hiking trail on the eastern end of the city. To call it a mountain is a bit of a stretch — it’s really not much taller than a big hill, but the sides are steep. The hiking trail brings you up a series of staircases that lead to 7 massive rocks that all provide amazing views of the city. The walk up should take about 30 minutes if you take it easy, though we made it up in 20 minutes — running to keep ahead of a horde of bloodthirsty mosquitos that quickly descended upon you if you stayed still for longer than a few seconds.

Monday morning

9:30am — Depart Taipei

Get back to San Francisco at 6:30am. Brace yourself — this is the hardest part of the trip, as it’s really in your best interest to stay awake for the full day to speed up your body clock reset. I recommend strong coffee and impromptu jumping jacks.

And that’s it! If you’ve been dreaming for awhile of taking a spontaneous trip to the other side of the world, I hope this blog post provides some resources and encouragement to make that trip a reality.