# -*- coding: UTF-8 -*-
naam = u"grümblz"

# This works fine
"bla" + naam + "bla"

ascii = naam.encode('ascii', 'xmlcharrefreplace')

# gives "grümblz"
print ascii

# Here I'd like to have unicode back, 
# so that it'd throw an exception while
# printing
print "unicode:", unicode(u"%s"%ascii)