diff --git a/sitemap/generator/pipelines.py b/sitemap/generator/pipelines.py
index 50f385b6..ebbcac6b 100644
--- a/sitemap/generator/pipelines.py
+++ b/sitemap/generator/pipelines.py
@@ -83,7 +83,7 @@ class ExportSitemap(object):
                                              % spider.domain))
         with open(os.path.join(os.getcwd(), "sitemap_%s.xml" % spider.domain),
                   'w') as pretty:
-            pretty.write(lxml.etree.tostring(tree, pretty_print=True))
+            pretty.write(lxml.etree.tostring(tree, pretty_print=True, encoding='unicode'))
 
     def process_item(self, item, spider):
         self.exporter.export_item(item)
diff --git a/sitemap/generator/spiders/sitemap_file.py b/sitemap/generator/spiders/sitemap_file.py
index dfbc41e2..57d31264 100644
--- a/sitemap/generator/spiders/sitemap_file.py
+++ b/sitemap/generator/spiders/sitemap_file.py
@@ -110,6 +110,6 @@ class SitemapSpider(spiders.CrawlSpider):
             timestamp = response.headers['Last-Modified']
         else:
             timestamp = response.headers['Date']
-        lastmod = time.strptime(timestamp, "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z")
+        lastmod = time.strptime(timestamp.decode("utf-8"), "%a, %d %b %Y %H:%M:%S %Z")
         item['lastmod'] = time.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z", lastmod)
         return item