Python UTF-8 comparison

a = {"a":"çö"}
b = "çö"
a['a']
>>> '\xc3\xa7\xc3\xb6'

b.decode('utf-8') == a['a']
>>> False

What is going in there?

edit= I'm sorry, it was my mistake. It is still False. I'm using Python 2.6 on Ubuntu 10.04.