system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Eli5: If you're dehydrated and then you drink water, how long does it take to get where it needs to go? How does it get there?
gpt
When you drink water, it gets absorbed through your intestines (like food), gets into your blood, and then travels to where it needs to go.

If you drink water on an empty stomach, it gets the green light to go to the intestines right away. It starts entering the bloodstream within 5 minutes of drinking it. Half of it is absorbed into the bloodstream by the 11-13 minute mark, and the rest is absorbed within 2 hours.

Drinking water at the same time as eating food changes the timeline. 

It's the stomach's job to make sure everything is ready to be digested (all squished up and mixed together), and food takes way longer to get ready than water does! The water has to wait patiently while the food gets ready to go. When everything in the stomach is ready, the intestines open up and things start being absorbed. 

(The time it takes food to get ready in the stomach varies, but it's somewhere between 45 minutes and 2 hours.)

Hope that helps!