dealing with special characters in Python and MySQL

[ronrsr]

>
> are you passing in the strings as Unicode strings, or as something else?
>   if you're using something else, what have you done to tell the
> database what it is?
>


not at all sure what I'm passing it as.

The database default  encoding is utf-8
the database collation is utf-8
the page encoding of the page is utf-8

what else do I have to tell the database?