And unless my knowledge of the Python standard library is way off, the Python standard library is written in Python, not C. That's what all those .py files are

And unless my knowledge of the Python standard library is way off, the Python standard library is written in Python, not C. That's what all those .py files are in the /lib folder. So python scripts spend most of their time calling into Python libraries. It's true that the interpreter is written in c (c++?,) maybe that's what you were thinking of.