Quality vs. Quantity of felt time or The Sensation of Time

I was in Nepal for a while and after one month a certain difference occured in the matter of how I perceived time. And it stayed like this - even intensified. I'm not shure why it changes so much especially in Nepal. I have been living a couple of years in different countries, but this feeling has never crept upon me more obvious than in Nepal. The strong intensity was stunning. And I'm not the only one. I believe it is part of what people find so utterly fascinating in this now troubled kingdom - apart from the awesome landscape, the friendly people, and the utterly colourful traditions in religion and culture.
I found a quote in a book I read there. It describes the feeling perfectly: Time has quality, not quantity there. While it flies here with the blink of an eye, it stands almost still over there. I still wonder why ....

".... If I were pressed to give one reason, one specific observation of why the life in Nepal seems so much more vivid than life anywhere else, I would answer with a single word: time. There is a quality to time spent in Nepal that can only be described as inhalant.
Back home in the Wild West, time whips by with the relentless and terrible purpose of a strangling vine filmed in fast motion. A week, two months, ten years snap past like amnesia, a continual barrage of workdays, appointments, dinner dates and laundromats, television shows and video cassettes, parking meters, paydays and phone calls.
You can watch it from Asia. You read the newspapers, you think about your friends back home - marching along in the parade of events - and you know it's still happening. It's happening there. On the other side. Yesterdays, todays and tomorrows are tumbling after each other like Sambo and the tiger, blending into an opaque and viscious ooze. There is no such thing as now; only a continual succession of laters, whipping their tendrils around the calendar. The clutches of the vine ...
In Nepal, the phenomenon is reversed. Time is a stick of incense that burns without being consumed. One day can seem like a week; a week, like months. Mornings stretch out and crack their spines with the yogic impassivity of house cats. Afternoons bulge with a succulent ripeness, like fat peaches. There is time enough to do everything - write a letter, eat breakfast, read the newspaper, visit a shrine or two, listen to the birds, bicycle downtown, change money, buy postcards, shop for Buddhas - and arrive home in time for lunch." [Jeff Greenwald, Shopping for Buddhas]