UNICODE and UTF-8

Hi,

I tried to reproduce the same DB on my local server as my web provider gave
me access.

On this DB (from provider) i can see via phpAdmin pages that encoding is
setup to UNICODE.
after reading some documentation, i've seen that i had to create my DB on my
local server like that :

create database mydatabase with encoding='UNICODE';

however, when i do this, my encoding is in UTF-8 via phpAdmin.
UTF8 is a part of UNICODE, but as i'm not sure on how many bits is UNICODE,
how can i setup my local DB to UNICODE value as my provider has ?

thanks a lot,

Al.