On January 25th 2ou, a day that would enter Egypt's very long annals, the streets of downtown Cairo were filled with ragged groups of protesters hiding from swirls of tear gas. Truncheons bounced off limbs and bullets zipped into puddles like lumps of sugar into coffee cups. This was the start of the 18-day protest that felled Hosni Mubarak, the country's strongman. Watching from the sidelines were guests at Cafe Riche. Waiters in blue robes with gold trim delivered steaming pots of Turkish coffee and plates of grilled aubergine to wide-eyed smokers staring out of a window neatly inscribed, "Founded 1908". For more than a century Cafe Riche has been a sanctuary for observers of Egyptian public life. Two blocks from Tahrir Square, the ground zero of the revolution, it sits among stately buildings from Cairo's belle epoque, conceived by European architects as a "Paris on the Nile".
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