xxx
Ten or fifteen years back I knew that xxx stood for so called straight edge movement (people who believed in “no sex, no drugs, no alcohol” life). Nowadays type “xxx” in Google and you’ll get thousands of links to all sorts of porn sites. Today I googled “xxx amsterdam”. Anyone who has been to the city knows that you can find this sign almost everywhere, including public rubbish bins. It can’t be the straight edge thing I thought, but then again I found it hard to believe that I should link it to pornography. So I checked it and it turned out that the xxx sign is a part of Amsterdam’s Coat of Arms. The three crosses in the coat of arms are the St. Andrew’s Crosses. On this type of cross (which resembles the letter X) one of Jesus’ disciples died, according to the tradition. I’m afraid however, that the contemporary Amsterdam (and I don’t mean the authorities here) has adopted the sign to mean something entirely different. How ironic is that…
And one more thing. I have this habit, a need rather, to visit a church whenever I am in a foreign city (in western countries that is). It evokes the feeling of belonging to the Western civilization, the continuity and unity. As I was strolling through the streets of Amsterdam I could not find a single church that I could enter (most of them are adapted for hotels now anyway), instead I found myself in the red-light district.
