I had been in Doha for two days when Hussan told me that he had something to say to me. We were sitting in his car, looking out over a drab stretch of beach he described as his favourite spot in all of Qatar and listening to Eminem.
"I have a problem," he said. "My friends, they say to me: Hussan, why don't you come with us for whiskey and girl parties? I want to go but I never do because I always get a strange feeling and say no. What should I do?" he said. I told Hussan I had never been to a whisky and girl party but it sounded like a good idea in principle.
Alcohol is not banned in Qatar but Qataris are not allowed to drink in the international hotels that house the only bars that serve it. So if they want to drink, Hussan's friends have to do it at home.
This can be difficult because most unmarried Qataris live with their parents, few of whom are indulgent when it comes to whisky and girls.
In fact, few young Qataris are interested in alcohol and many who try it find that they don't like it much. Mohammed, a 25-year-old Kuwaiti student of history at the University of Qatar, had his first drink in The Front Lounge when he visited Dublin in August.
"I didn't like the taste of beer so I only had one. But the Irish people, they drank many, too much," he said.
Like Hussan, Mohammed stays away from parties but spends hours hanging around City Centre, a vast, opulent shopping centre near the Corniche in Doha. City Centre boasts a branch of Debenhams, a Starbucks coffee shop and every designer clothes shop you can think of.
In the hangar-like Carrefour supermarket, husbands in long, white dishdashas and traditional head-dress trail alongside their wives for the weekly shopping experience. Young Qataris like Hussan feel equally comfortable in traditional costume and in T-shirt, jeans and baseball cap, but they dress traditionally when they go to see the bank manager.
Only 30 per cent of Qatar's population is Qatari, with Pakistanis, Filipinos, Sudanese and others accounting for the rest. Most Qataris are fairly well-off and the centre of Doha gleams with wealth. A couple of miles outside the centre, however, many of the houses are tiny and run down, with no indoor sanitation. Although few in Qatar go hungry, there are not many who enjoy the lavish lifestyle of the Emir and his huge extended family.
Hussan, who studies engineering and wants to run the 100 metres for Qatar in the Olympics, is prosperous enough to own a brand new jeep and to travel abroad from time to time.
"I've been to Rome, Paris, London and the US. But the best place I've ever been is Iran, you have everything there," he said.
Mohammed enjoyed his holiday in Britain and Ireland and liked everyone he met there, including the kind ladies who tried to force bacon and sausages on him every morning.
"I'm not a good Muslim but I'm a Muslim. My cousin is one of those with a beard. He said to me: 'You've changed since you started meeting Europeans and you're going against your religion.' But I think I do nothing bad," he said.
Hussan likes Europeans and likes to go on holidays abroad but he has no ambition to leave Qatar.
"Here I have my friends and my family. If I went away I would miss my brother and maybe there would be nobody to help me there. Here, it doesn't matter if you have no friends because everyone will help you," he said.
I thought of Hussan at midnight on Sunday as I sat in the bar of the Sheraton Hotel, where the World Trade Organisation is meeting. What would he have made of the spectacle on stage - three Thai girls in red hot pants and tank tops and knee-high boots crooning trashy hits from the 1980s? A few portly trade negotiators had taken their jackets off and were wriggling on the dance floor while the rest of us sat around morosely sipping our drinks. Glancing around at this dismal scene, it was hard to feel that Hussan was missing much. As for the Thai girls, I was reminded of a remark made to me in Berlin some years ago during a concert by the local gay men's choir: "I don't know what they do in those rehearsals but it's not singing."
