How to get Grid sortorder within Vaadin 8

Previously I had setup my Grids so that I could remember their sorting order as a saved preference. To do this I had the following code where sortOrderList is a String:

for(SortOrder sortOrder : grid.getSortOrder())
{
    String gridSortOrder = sortOrder.getPropertyId() 
                         + GRID_SORT_PREFERENCE_SEPARATOR 
                         + sortOrder.getDirection() 
                         + GRID_SORT_PREFERENCE_NEXT_SEPERATOR);
}

Unfortunately this code no longer works. I saw in the following in the documentation:

grid.setSortOrder(GridSortOrder.asc(cityColumn).thenDesc(nameColumn))

Which will make parsing it back different but the problem is how do I parse the existing sorting order into a String? The main issue I'm running into is that sortOrder.getPropertyId() no longer exists. This lead me down the lines of trying to loop through the columns but I also ran into another issue here:

column.getSortOrder(sortDirection)

I don't understand why I have to add a SortDirection object to get the SortOrder. In any case it brings back a stream which wouldn't work if you have multi-column sorting. At least that's my thinking.

So my question is how can I get a list of the columns being sorted as well as what the sorting order is for each column?
 

for (GridSortOrder<?> sortOrder : grid.getSortOrder()) {
                String gridSortOrder = sortOrder.getSorted().getId() + GRID_SORT_PREFERENCE_SEPARATOR
                        + sortOrder.getDirection() + GRID_SORT_PREFERENCE_NEXT_SEPERATOR;
            }

Thank you, it's much appreciated. Sorry for the delay in responding, I just haven't been able to get to this task until now.