The Lonely Planet travel guide once suggested Qatar might be the most boring place on Earth. But you couldn't call it boring today — even if the nightlife should carry a public-mirth warning.
Outside the Irish Bar at the Doha Sheraton, a bouncer electronically scans the passports of arriving patrons. I asked whether he wanted to see my boarding pass as well, but he just blinked at me. He probably gets a lot of that.
Doha is not a party town, to be sure. It's less Sandance and more Think Tank. The red carpets and velvet ropes are as likely to be for thought leaders as for celebrities.
But for the sort of folk who like to give keynote speeches on knowledge-based economies and "new Silk Roads", this is the Ibiza of the Gulf.
Even the Taliban come here for weekend breaks. They like it so much they're opening an office - perhaps with a receptionist wearing a black turban and headset, reading Hello!between calls.
It's easy to forget that without the foreigners, this is a country of fewer than 300,000 very rich people. That is slightly more than the population of Belfast, where the Taliban are not currently represented, or slightly less than Kandahar, where they are.
Like a bantamweight with a George Foreman jab, Qatar has started to punch above its weight on the world stage. But its ambitions at home are just as great - and ironically in this case, the country's vast wealth has become more of a hindrance than a help.
Along with most of its Gulf neighbours, Qatar wants to be a knowledge economy, and there are regiments of tweedy types in campuses across Doha happy to tell the Qataris how to do it.
Knowledge economies are all the rage as the old manufacturing and exporting empires of the West try to prolong their dancing days and stave off incontinent dotage for another generation or two.
Knowledge economies are even more coveted by Gulf states. In the West, it's about dwindling competitiveness. Here, it's about dwindling hydrocarbons. But knowledge economies may not be all they're cracked up to be. Ireland had a great one just before everyone emigrated.
Now there's more craic to be had on karaoke night at the Doha Irish bar, where you will meet plenty of exiles singing knowledge-based ballads from the old country. Ireland was able to build its knowledge economy by churning out thousands of well-educated graduates who until the 1990s had looked forward only to emigration or, if they were lucky, low-paid jobs at home.
But the problem with attempting this in a country with the world's richest people is not teaching the knowledge, it's finding anyone who wants to learn it. Other Gulf states face the same difficulty.
How do you convince such affluent school leavers to sacrifice a safe and well-paid government job for a tough science or maths-based degree?
And how do you produce them in sufficient numbers to attract the sort of multinationals that invested in Ireland? Answering that question might be better left to the Doha Debates.
But it seems clear that you don't get there by increasing public wages by 60 per cent overnight when your people are already the richest in the world. Yet that is precisely what Qatar did six months ago.
Now it seems hard to imagine Qatari schoolkids grappling with the kind of career dilemmas that may have bothered Robert Frost, the American poet, who once famously mused on the decisions we reach at the crossroads of life.
Convincing them that the path to knowledge has a better claim over the one that goes to easy street will be the real challenge - and the one that makes all the difference for the architects of Qatar's knowledge-based future.
Until then, young Qataris will be more than happy to take the road more travelled. The only choice will be whether to use the Porsche or the Range Rover.
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