Planeta Calleja closed the season on Wednesday night with the visit of Ana Mena, one of the most outstanding singers on the pop scene today in Spain. Led by Jesús Calleja, the woman from Malaga has traveled to Thailand to learn more about the country and its capital, Bangkok, in the program broadcast by Cuatro.
This is the first time that Ana Mena steps on the Asian continent. Proof of this is that the artist did not know some of the country’s rules and customs, such as not wearing shorts in places of religious worship. On this she has ironized with Calleja at the beginning of the program.
After their meeting in one of the Buddhist temples, the singer and the presenter have launched to know the Chinatown of Bangkok, coinciding with the celebration of the Chinese New Year. The visit also took place at the same time that Ana Mena was releasing new music, so she wanted to know if she would do well with this release.
Through a ritual, all doubts were cleared. “She’s lucky. She’s going to have more and more money and more work,” they told her after it was done. “It is a Chinese belief that says that you will earn a lot of money,” they continued to explain.
Ana Mena opened up later, on a visit to “the Venice of Bangkok”, about her personal life and her origins. “My parents are very normal, hard-working, humble, very familiar people, with beautiful values…”, she commented about her family. Her artistic vocation also comes from them: “My mother sang flamenco, my grandfather on her mother’s side also sang flamenco, and that love for music has always been breathed in my house,” she explained.
That is the reason why the singer did not “finish high school”, as she later recounted. “Life threw me into other paths such as fiction, I did things as an actress in television series that took up a lot of time,” she said, although all by her own decision: “Everything I’ve done in my life, childhood and adolescence, I I did it because I wanted to do it. It was my way of playing, enjoying and connecting with myself”, she said.
One of Ana Mena’s first roles in fiction was in a Pedro Almodóvar film, The Skin I Live In. About it, she says that “they needed a girl who could sing in Portuguese”, something that was a bit complicated for her. “Almodóvar made an appointment with me in his office, in his office,” she says about the opportunity to play a role in a film by the filmmaker. There she sang a cappella, “at the moment”, the song that she was going to interpret.
Traveling to the city of Chiang Mai, in the north of Thailand, Ana Mena and Jesús Calleja lived a real adventure rafting on the river, although for the artist it was more of an odyssey. There they have learned about the work of the Chai Lai Orchid Foundation, aimed at the reintegration of girls and women victims of sexual exploitation, and that they have chanted and danced one of Ana Mena’s hits to the singer’s surprise.
Ana and Calleja have also been able to visit the Temple of the Coffins, a sacred place where donations are collected for those who cannot pay for their burial. There they have talked about their vision of death and reincarnation: “I always try to talk to my loved ones who have left me, like my grandfather,” confessed Ana Mena.
Regarding her friendship with fellow singer Abraham Mateo, who comes from her childhood, she has assured that she has known him “since the first contest” she entered when she was just a girl. “He was already there, and the first time we went on stage was together,” she has said.
