Unicode conversion issue

We have a PostgreSQL database in Unicode that I'm trying to read into a 
C# application.  In theory, the easiest thing to do would be to use the 
Beta ODBC Unicode driver or one of the .NET data providers for 
PostgreSQL, but these seem to be fairly immature.

So, I'm hoping to use the standard ODBC driver, which seems quite 
mature, to read and write to a Unicode database.  Can this be done by 
properly decoding and encoding?

For starters, I'm wondering if someone can help me to understand just 
what the standard psqlODBC is returning to my C# application when I read 
a unicode string?  The ASCII characters (<128)  are returning as ASCII 
characters, but the higher characters are turning into 4 unicode 
characters, or 8 bytes.  My initial thought was that this was UTF-8, but 
UTF-8 is maximum 6 bytes.