Well, then, amateur hour in my dorm lobby cough years back drove me to pinochle for no real reason. =P
Yes, all bidding is transparent to both sides and you are within your rights to ask an explanation (though not from the person who made the bid – his or her partner. This prevents the bidder from explaining his bid to his partner.).
Bidding is not set to trick your opponent, but rather to communicate with your partner. And even if you manage to get some sort of trick bid past your opponents, it may just screw it up for yourself.
For a beginner, though, there’s no reason to use anything other than a standard bidding method. About the only convention I play is Blackwood, and that is only needed ever few hundred hands.
I played a lot of bridge from public school until I was about 40, and tremendously enjoyed it. I have never had the slightest interest in other card games, for they bore me to tears. Don’t let your lack of experience in other card games affect your decision whether or not to get into bridge, for there really is no comparison.
I think the hardest thing for a newbie player is the bidding system. even a rather simple bidding system (say 5-card majors) can seem confusing and arbitrary to one just starting the game, particularly since its relatively independent from the actual rules, but you can’t even begin to play until you’ve learned it. So it would be difficult to just walk into a random game room on line and start playing. Your best bet is to learn it from your friends. Have them write down a step by step cheat sheet that will tell you what to bid. Also having someone looking over your shoulder to help you play the first few games might help too. It may take some time to gain proficiency but if you like intellectually challenging games, I would give it some time. If not, tend bar.
Obviously you were playing social bridge, as opposed to duplicate–which is the real game, and requires at least 8 people. In duplicate you don’t play against your opponents, as you did in social bridge playing against your grandparents. You can’t really judge the game if you’re talking about that.
It seems like most in this thread are not making a distinction between social bridge and duplicate bridge, which is huge.
Duplicate bridge is what makes bridge an amazing game, because it, better than any other card game I have played, mitigates the luck factor. When you play duplicate, you are competing against other people who are playing the same cards that you are playing, and whoever plays them the best wins.
As for what makes you want to play - my answer is that it is a game that will reward consistent effort, and give learning satisfaction even years after you have started. I have been playing off & on for about 15 years, and still feel like there is a lot I can learn about the more advanced strategies, and it is complicated enough that I rarely play a perfect game. If you can stomach the rather steep learning curve (you will definitely be confused early on and make many mistakes), you will find a game that you can enjoy for the rest of your life.
Duplicate bridge and poker are the only card games sufficiently interesting to be worth playing imho. Rubber bridge is a good lead-in, and fine for casual practice, but duplicate is where it’s at - no luck, only probability and a lot of skill.
I learnt bridge at 11 and played a lot of competition stuff at school. In a way it’s a shame, because it spoiled me - poker aside, all other card games appear bland, thin, luck-based, and inferior in every way.
Don’t expect to pick it up in 5 minutes. Don’t regard this as a bad thing.
It may seem nitpicking, but money bridge is a form of the game not quite the same as “social” bridge, and is a “real game” requiring real skill. 
If I were forced to bet on how superior money players would fare playing IMP-scored duplicate for the first time, compared with how superior matchpoint players would fare playing money rubber bridge for the first time, I would definitely bet on the former. (Reverse IMP’s and matchpoints and it would be much less clear. )
For anyone wanting to try bridge, you can download software that will teach you the game from the American Contract Bridge League here.
I second all of those who say that there is no other card game like it in terms of skill and strategy. I have been playing for years, but still regard myself as improving. I play 2 or 3 times a week, read bridge books voraciously, and watch the experts on BBO.
I know it sound hokey, but while your group is just starting to learn bridge, get your hands on a table cloth that has the basics printed out on it.
Also, consider playing a few hands with everyone’s cards on the table so that you can all see what the other has. That way the group of you can discuss bidding and playing while you are doing it.
You really are some card nerds. Duplicate Bridge as a recommendation?? That ain’t what Lucy and Desi and Fred and Ethel played, that’s for sure. That’s one serious game.
I used to love Bridge (plain old bridge), but so few people play it, nor know the conventions, it’s almost not worth the effort.
Can’t beat Gin Rummy (tournament style) for skill, though, and psych-outs. Never saw a computer that could beat me, which is weird, because while my memory is not great, a computer’s is better than great.
I’ve played with friends. So what is the difference between “Contract”, “Duplicate” and “Social”?
Someone doesn’t have theirHoyle! Contract bridge is as far as I can remember, the basic kind of bridge, but Duplicate is actually pretty complicated, with its own little tool for holding the cards in stasis and, it’s a serious M-effing card game. And, as the name suggests, you need a duple of four players (we’ll count the dummy hand as a player too! though they’re best served by serving Tom Collinses to the rest).
It’s not that complicated a game, at simplest contract bridge, but you need to be crafty and have a partner who knows what you mean if you bid such-and-such. If you can play Hearts very well, then Bridge shouldn’t be that hard. Its one of those games you really need to study, though, to get any good at. Chess with cards? Maybe.
Contract bridge = social bridge: a pair of people play against another pair of people, and whoever wins, wins.
Duplicate bridge is the same thing, only the exact same card hands are played by the various pairs of players (often in a league, in which large rooms are filled with players), and whoever plays a particular hand better than those other players who also played that exact same hand wins.
The nice thing about social bridge is that it is social. You spend time with your friends, taking your time and conversing between hands. The downside of social bridge is that you are stuck with Dimwitted Doris who could not bid her way out of a penny auction or play the right card if her life depended on it, and if you have bad luck at the draw, you lose to her even if you are a better player. Houseleague.
The nice thing about duplicate bridge is that you get exposure to better players and more advanced bidding conventions, and the luck of the draw does not exist so that the best player wins. The down side it that some folks are a wee bit too intense, and in leagues the evening does not allow for much casual conversation between hands (and you have to find someone to assemble the various card hands). Varsity.
A really nice combination is to get two or more tables of players who are your friends, and play duplicate bridge at one of your homes. That way the best player wins and you have the satisfaction of not being subject to the luck of the draw, but you get to have a nice night with your friends rather sweating it out in a large room full of bridge sharks.
How so?
Because you’re being scored not against the deal from the deck, but against the field of players who got the same deal as you. There’s still room for guessing wrong, but it’d be the same guess that everybody else would have to take - so on average and over time, skill will tell very clearly more than anything else.
A bridge playing friend of mine in college was wont to cluck sympathetically to stories of disaster deals from new players and say “unlucky” to them in an exaggerated way (“unnnn-lucky”). If asked, he would explain that being unnnnnnlucky was different from simply experiencing bad luck.
"If you bid a 90+% slam [committing to taking 12 of the 13 tricks] that only went down one on a 3-0 trump break with the Qxx with your LHO specifically behind your AKJTxx holding, and nobody else bid the great slam, well yeah, that’s unlucky.
But if you go down in a contract when you chose to take 2 different finesses - each a 50% chance, for a net 25% chance of failure - when the contract was cold [a 100% lock] if you had realized that your LHO, having opened the bidding with 1S and therefore had at least 5 of them, could be endplayed after drawing trump if you ducked the first round of spades, then played Ace and another, forcing him to open up the side suits so you wouldn’t have to choose a finesse… that’s unnnnnnnlucky for you. You can work on that."
(Of course there’s also the “luck of the field” - you played a difficult board against expert or lucky opponents who made just the right bids or plays that nobody else did to get an optimal result for their side, which conversely is the worst result for yours - but again, that evens out over time, and if you’re good enough you’ll reap more of that sort of reward than you give out.)
In bridge, each player is dealt a hand of cards, and in conjunction with his or her partner then bids and plays the cards against those of the opposing pair of players. Whichever pair of players wins the most points (by winning the most tricks), wins thehand. If a pair of players is dealt strong hands, odds are that they will defeat and equally skilled pair of players who were dealt weak hands.
For duplicate bridge, imagine that there are two tables of four players each rather than just one table of four players, and at each table the exact same card hands are dealt out. The two games proceed, and due to the skill of the players, the pair of players who win the hand at one table wins more points (tricks) than the pair of players who won the hand at the other table playing the exact same hand. The difference in the number of points won by each pair of players when compared to the points won by the pair playing the exact same hand is what counts, not whether they actually won the hand or not. It does not matter if you win or lose the hand. What matters is how well you play the exact same hand when compared to other player pairs at other tables playing the exact same hand.
Now increase the number of tables/competitors, and rotate the player pairs about, such that by the end of the night, you are able to rank the success of each player pair against each other player pair who have played the exact same card hands. Whoever played the best wins (as opposed to whoever won the most hands).
Here’s another way of looking at it. Image that you and your buddies are having a race across town in identical cars. Due to traffic and stop lights at intersections, who will win will be determined partly on driving ability, and partly on luck. Now imagine that you and your buddies are racing about the Nurbergring, each driving the exact same course in identical cars, but starting separately so that you each have a clear course. The fastest lap time wins despite the separate starts because the conditions were identical.
OK, different tables get the same hand? Wow.
It all becomes clear.
Who ever thought that up, the Marquis de Sade? 
People sick of having friends / opponents / kibitzers go on about how “if I’d had your cards I would rake it in”.
Not so. Contract bridge is simply the full name of what is more commonly called bridge. Contract bridge is played in two main forms: rubber bridge and duplicate. Duplicate has several forms, such as pairs or teams of varying sizes, and several types of scoring, such as IMPs, match points or even total point scoring.
The key point about duplicate is that the result is determined by comparing what you do with other pairs or teams playing the same hands (“duplicated” hands).
Social bridge is usually rubber bridge. In rubber bridge there is nobody else playing duplicated hands. You play what you are dealt, and hence how good cards you are dealt is a bigger factor.