Dear present and future me, friends and visitors. Unicodifiying your computers is not a hard thing to do. If you use Python3, then the str type is unicode. In Python2, you need to use the built-in type unicode.
bencord0@parsley ~ $ sudo cat /etc/env.d/02locale
LANG="en_GB.UTF-8"
bencord0@parsley ~ $ sudo env-update && source /etc/profile
>>> Regenerating /etc/ld.so.cache...
bencord0@parsley~ $ locale
LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_GB.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
bencord0@parsley~ $ python3
Python 3.1.4 (default, Dec 13 2011, 16:25:45)
[GCC 4.4.5] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> '\u0394'
'Δ'
>>> exit()
bencord0@parsley~ $ python2
Python 2.7.2 (default, Nov 1 2011, 13:03:41)
[GCC 4.4.5] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> print u'\u0394'
Δ
>>>
The rest of the time, just remember to catch UnicodeDecodeError.