Weird character encoding issue

I have a site running smoothly with WP 2.0.5. Now I decided to back it up on my laptop and I found something weird.

I downloaded all the directory structure and then proceded to backup the database. I then tried to re-create it locally and found that accented characters where displaying improperly. I thought I just messed up the procedure.

After several attempts paying attention to every little detail I poked into the remote database with phpMyAdmin and to my surprise I could see weird characters *inside* the contents of my wp_post table.

This is really weird because they display properly on the site (www.interescena.com) but if I try to replicate a working installation of it I fail.

As far as I can check, everything should be UTF-8 and it is so. I can go inside the admin panel and in the reading options I find UTF-8 as the encoding for posts and feeds.

If I check the meta tag in the head of the index page I also find it’s UTF-8.

What else can I verify?

Felix.