formatted string like---> u'720 S'

[Bell, Kevin]

I'm building a dictionary from values a database and upon print the
dictionary I see key value pairs like this:

u'Briarcliff' : [u'2500 E'],
u'Shumway' : [ u'2600 E']

do I need to slice off the "u", or anything?  I know it has something to
do with unicode but I don't know how to treat it.