/diy/ - Do It Yourself

This isn't exactly a ham radio question, but here goes since it's a radio thread:
>got a radio scanner recently
>it scans several bands
>only legible stuff I've managed to listen to so far are some old guys talking about cars on the private band, something that sounds like hotel(?) communication(room so-and-so: code 3, stuff like that) and some stuff on the air/marine band like "echo echo 6-5" that makes zero sense to me. Maybe some code words ATC uses?
>everything else sounds like it's been encoded in some way - it's not static, but doesn't make any sense either, like it's encoded digital data or something
I'm really kinda new to this and have no idea what I'm supposed to even be scanning, but it seems that the frequency bands that transmit stuff might be really different here since it's a foreign-built scanner and all I've managed to hear on the bands the scanner uses by default has been asinine and confusing(apart from middle aged guys talking about their trucks' exhaust pipes and stuff).

Now, I'm not exactly a newcomer to radio hardware, but the culture around it really does confuse me in a big way since I'm a 25 year old and as such have pretty much always had Internet. Sorry for making a blog post but how the hell are you supposed to know if you never ask?