I thought it is only me. I share exact same experience. After I programmed in Perl for almost 1.5 year.I switched to python for just fun . But I never comprehend deeply whats going on in python like I do in Perl , even though I have written advanced code in python.
I've always felt like I hit weird and unexplainable performance walls in Python...my code is either quite fast, or quite slow, and the syntax differences that cause that aren't always clear. With Perl 5, things just sort of chug along at a predictable Perl speed and you could always try to tune certain parts for more speed, but if you didn't bother you had a reasonable idea at how it should perform. Things like this always make me feel like Python is doing things I don't understand.
That really shouldn't be the case. You get hashtable namespace lookups slowing everything down in either language. Beyond that, there shouldn't be any real barrier. Did you try profiling your Python?
