International students have traditionally had their own booth in the festival, called ‘iPub’. The booth sells exotic international cuisines and drinks that are often not common to Koreans. The Postech Times interviewed Hyo-seung Lee(EE 13), the representative of DICE, the dormitory in POSTECH for international students and Sun-young Jung(LIFE 13), the head manager of this year’s iPub.
Q. What dishes and drinks are going to be served this time?
In this year’s iPub, Pakistan, Vietnam, Singapore, and Kenya participated. One cuisine for each of the four countries, chicken paratha (flat bread traditionally made in South Asia) roll, pho (Vietnamese rice noodles), hokkien noodles, and chapatti & beef stew with fried kales (chapatti is a traditional Indian bread) were served. Unfortunately, for this year, no alcohol was served. While iPub was prepared with spontaneous participation, this year’s iPub lacked participants. Also, even though iPub has been initiated with financial supports partially from International Students and Scholar Services (ISSS), the budget was not enough to prepare for drinks.
Q. Where do you guys get access to foreign ingredients?
Making sure that correct ingredients are purchased is the most important and difficult job for iPub. Purchasing foreign ingredients  ensures that exotic taste is kept for the cuisines, at the expense of high prices and difficulty of purchasing them. Therefore, there had to be some compromises in the sense of budget, where too expensive ingredients were replaced by appropriately similar Korean ingredients. Fortunately, international students were fully aware of where to get access to exotic ingredients that were not common in Korea. Most of foreign ingredients that did not exist in common markets were purchased from the internet or sometimes from the Asian market that sold Halal ingredients.
Q. How is the preparation team for iPub organized?
The preparation team was organized according to the country, like Pakistan, Vietnam, Singapore and Kenya for this year. For the sake of communication with others, each team had one Korean manager. The managers help international students with purchasing food ingredients that are mostly written in Korean, advertisements of iPub to other Korean students, tasting food, etc. Furthermore, while some managers who are confident with cooking help international students with preparing the cuisines, other managers execute other jobs such as budget management and purchasing team t-shirts.